About HANDS

Since 1986, Housing and Neighborhood Development Services, Inc. (HANDS) has implemented a neighborhood revitalization effort in the neighboring cities of Orange and East Orange, NJ.

By targeting the most pivotal properties for development, engaging citizens and other stakeholders, and leveraging investments of time and funds, HANDS has stabilized neighborhoods and created long-term sustainable change.

HANDS focuses on redeveloping vacant homes (some facing foreclosure) for affordable homeownership, adaptively reusing former industrial and commercial buildings as mixed use developments, developing resident leaders and leading community visioning and comprehensive planning, and community engagement through wealth-building programs.

HANDS is a nonprofit corporation and a chartered affiliate of NeighborWorks® America.

Our Strategy

Our experience in Orange gives us a unique vantage point as we move towards the next phase of our mission. Our strategy is to work from two currently dominant frameworks of community revitalization:

  • (1) Improving the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and

  • (2) Building a Local Living Economy (LLE).

These two complementary and reinforcing frameworks dictate public and private sector policymaking and funding decisions in the community development arena.

Social Determinants of Health

In recent years HANDS has embraced a compelling “social determinants of health” framework to design, develop and implement its holistic community and economic development strategies and neighborhood empowerment initiatives. Simply put, access to quality housing, jobs, education, wealth accumulation, social cohesion, and political power significantly influence individual, family, and community vulnerability to disease or injury.

Local Living Economy

Creating a “ local living economy” (LLE) is the goal of people who use business to create healthy, equitable communities. A simple example of an LLE action is a commitment to “buy local.” More broadly it means assisting local stakeholders to identify, launch and grow the businesses that are needed to serve their community. Building healthy, equitable local economies requires local ecosystems of individuals and institutions to come together, understand their relationships to each other and choose to collaborate.