Who We Are
Our mission is to transform and revitalize the Northside into a vibrant and sustainable community in which its residents have an opportunity to thrive.
Birmingham's Northside communities were built by the people who built Birmingham — pipe workers, railroad crews, nurses, teachers, pastors, and shopkeepers who put down roots within walking distance of the work. One of these neighborhoods was a whole city of its own before Birmingham annexed it. Another was left in trust to the workers of the plant that built it. Another guarded, through three bombings, the church where the civil rights movement found its general. For decades these neighborhoods carried the city's industry on their backs and its culture in their churches, ballfields, and front porches.
The Northside did not decline on its own. In 1937, federal appraisers graded nearly every residential block here unfit for lending — "mortgage funds: none" — and for generations almost no bank would write a loan on these streets. Interstates were routed through the middle of the community, taking homes and whole blocks. The hospital closed, the plants shed their payrolls, and the money stopped coming back. The families who stayed were not stuck. They stayed on purpose — and they organized, sued, rebuilt, and won more than they are given credit for.
“You are led to believe you need to leave — you need to measure success by how far you get away from there.”Majora Carter, on the story told to talented kids from neighborhoods like ours — the story these families refused
Northside Initiative was created to be the partner those families never had — the organization that holds the plan and aligns residents, funders, city government, and service providers behind the version the neighborhood actually asked for.
Our approach follows a neighborhood-scale model that has worked in cities across the country: one organization holds the whole plan and runs housing, education, wellness, and jobs at once — because running them one at a time is why so much neighborhood investment washes out.
Two frontier roads — the Huntsville stage road and the Stouts toll road — cross at a farmhouse in today's Evergreen, fifty years before Birmingham exists.
North Birmingham is laid out as a complete town of its own. Its 27th Street grows into the trading center of northeast Jefferson County; the town joins Birmingham in 1910.
Lauderdale College opens and gives Collegeville its name; Bethel Baptist Church is organized; and the American Cast Iron Pipe Company is founded beside the Finley rail corridor.
Norwood is platted along its landscaped boulevard, and the streetcar suburbs — Fountain Heights, Druid Hills, Norwood — fill with the homes that still line their streets.
John Eagan dies and leaves ACIPCO in trust to the people who work there — an experiment in employee ownership that continues to this day.
Federal appraisers redline nearly every residential block on the Northside: "mortgage funds: none." Generations of families are cut off from ordinary home lending.
Bethel Baptist, headquarters of the movement led by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, is bombed three times and never misses a service. In 1961 the Freedom Riders are carried here and sent on.
The interstates are driven through the community — taking homes, splitting neighborhoods, and cutting the Northside away from its own downtown.
Carraway hospital closes and, with a federal office relocation the same year, roughly three thousand jobs leave the Northside in a matter of months.
Federal crews begin cleaning contaminated soil from hundreds of North Birmingham and Collegeville yards; residents' own coalitions keep the cleanup moving.
Collegeville's long-fought bridge opens, so children no longer climb through stopped trains to reach school.
An amphitheater opens where Carraway stood, new homes are approved beside it, and ACIPCO commits $790 million to its plant — the Northside's next chapter begins.
Our footprint is seven adjacent neighborhoods immediately north of downtown Birmingham — a defined geography small enough to know by name and large enough to change the trajectory of a generation.
“The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”Martin Luther King Jr., 1956
Northside Initiative is formed to hold a single shared plan for Birmingham's Northside, convening residents, funders, and nonprofit partners behind it.
Residents complete the first neighborhood-wide listening process, setting the priorities that still anchor our strategy: housing, education, wellness, and jobs.
Critical repair work begins for long-time Northside homeowners, funded through the City of Birmingham's owner-occupied repair program.
The ARC Workforce Academy registers its apprenticeship program, putting neighborhood residents into paid training on the same blocks being repaired.
The first infill homes go up on vacant Northside lots — small buildings, local builders, one lot at a time.
Organizing begins for 3rd Places — the district at 12th Avenue North and Carraway Boulevard — bringing residents, business owners, and the city to one table for the Northside's own corner.
Invested in legacy homeowners
Families served
Where we work
Each of these neighborhoods has its own history — researched, sourced, and told below in brief. The full neighborhood record is available to any resident or partner who asks.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
Norwood was Birmingham’s promise to itself. In 1912 the city’s own founding company laid out a mile and a half of curving boulevard on the ridge north of downtown, planted park medians down its middle, and sold generous lots to the doctors, merchants, and builders of a booming young city. They called it the Placid Place — high above the smoke, minutes from the heart of town. The houses they built are still here: more than a thousand of them, Craftsman bungalows to columned mansions, one of the largest collections of early twentieth-century homes in Alabama, honored on the National Register of Historic Places.
The neighborhood has weathered everything since — lenders who wrote it off in the 1930s, an interstate that cut it away from downtown, the loss of the hospital that anchored it for a century. Through all of it, people stayed and kept the place alive: reopening the 1925 schoolhouse, restoring grand old houses one roof at a time, singing carols to homebound elders every Christmas. Today new families are moving in beside neighbors of fifty years, and new homes are rising where the hospital stood. Norwood’s boulevard is still a park in a thousand front yards — and its best days are still ahead.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
Druid Hills is the neighborhood that took care of Birmingham. Its frame houses went up in the 1910s alongside the streetcar and the hospital, and for ninety years the people of these blocks staffed the wards, ran the registers, and processed the checks — at Carraway’s bedsides, along the shops of 12th Avenue North, in the Social Security tower that paid benefits for the whole Southeast. When the neighborhood changed hands in the 1960s, its new families didn’t just move in; they organized. In 1972 the Druid Hills-Norwood Civic League stood up to City Hall to keep these blocks a place of front porches and single-family homes — and won, in one of the first great victories of neighborhood power in Birmingham.
That spirit still meets every month at St James Baptist Church, a congregation that helped carry the civil rights movement. Druid Hills has carried heavy losses — the hospital, the grocery, the school, thousands of jobs in a single year — but it sits today in the heart of the city, a quiet residential neighborhood between the stadium lights of Uptown and the new amphitheater rising where the hospital stood. Its neighbors said it best: come see. There is room here to build.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
Fountain Heights is where Birmingham began climbing its northern hills. Its first houses went up in the 1880s — Victorians with double chimneys and wrap-around porches, some of the oldest homes in the city — on streets the developers named things like Fountain Avenue, with views straight down to the skyline. Generations of the city’s story ran through these blocks: the families who built the first congregation-centered community here, and — on the neighborhood’s southern blocks — Kelly Ingram Park, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the Gaston Motel, ground the whole world knows. As the city opened up, Fountain Heights led the way: new families crossed over from Smithfield and made these hills their own, some buying homes their families keep to this day.
Then the interstates came — one up the neighborhood’s side, one through its middle, an interchange on its corner — and took houses, streets, and whole blocks with them. The people who stayed kept the neighborhood alive anyway. Today new homes rise beside the old ones, gardens grow where houses fell, and a 31-acre park now runs beneath the highway that once only divided. The hills are still here, and the view is still worth it.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
Evergreen is the oldest crossroads on the Northside. Before Birmingham existed, two frontier roads met here — the Huntsville stage road that carried mail and travelers between Cincinnati and New Orleans, and the Stouts toll road down from the Warrior River, laid out in 1822. A farmhouse stood where they crossed. Two hundred years later, Stouts Road still carries its name on the city map, and the old stage road through the neighborhood now bears the name of Fred Shuttlesworth, pointing up the ridge toward the church where Birmingham’s freedom movement was born.
The neighborhood that grew around the crossroads was a working people’s place — frame houses raised in the 1900s and 1910s by families who walked to the furnaces, the rail yards, and later the hospital, and who built their own institutions as they came: Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church has stood on 22nd Avenue North since 1906, twelve pastors in an unbroken line, and the neighborhood still gathers there every month. Evergreen is the smallest of the Northside’s neighborhoods, and much of its story was never written down — it lives in its people. New energy is rising on its edges, from the amphitheater to the Finley corridor. The crossroads has waited two centuries; its next chapter is being written now.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
North Birmingham was a city before it was a neighborhood. Laid out in 1886 as a complete town — houses, parks, factories, and a streetcar line to Birmingham — it incorporated in 1902 with its own mayor, fire brigade, and city hall, and joined Birmingham in 1910 only when the legislature insisted. What it built lasted: 27th Street grew into the trading center of northeast Jefferson County, with its own bank, its own five-and-dime, its own movie house, and a library the city built for it in 1926 that still serves the whole north side today.
Its people made pipe, coke, brick, and cloth for a century, and when the industries went quiet, the neighborhood carried the cost — including years of contaminated soil that federal crews have now cleaned from more than six hundred and fifty nearby homes, with the neighborhood’s own coalition fighting to see the work through. The bones of the old town are all still here: the intact storefronts of 27th Street waiting behind their facades, the park where a country club once danced, a modern high school on the old golf course grounds, and neighbors who still meet at the library every month. Few places in Birmingham have more standing to say: we know how to be a whole town, because we were one.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
Collegeville took its name from a college — Lauderdale College, opened in 1904, where hundreds of students learned trades in a city that offered them little else — and the neighborhood has been teaching the country ever since. Its families built their homes between the rail yards and the furnaces, walked to work, and raised institutions that outlasted everything around them: Hudson School, going strong since 1908, and Bethel Baptist Church, organized in 1904. From Bethel’s pulpit, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth led the movement that changed America. The church was bombed three times — Christmas night 1956, June 1958, December 1962 — and never missed a service. Neighbors took shifts in a glassed-in porch across the street to guard it through the night, and when the Freedom Riders were beaten in 1961, this is where they were carried, fed, and sent on.
That corner is now a National Historic Landmark, one of only three in Birmingham. The neighborhood that protected it is still here — still boxed in by the railroads, still carrying the weight of a century of industry in its soil, and still fighting: for the cleanup, for the bridge that finally opened in 2017 so children no longer climbed through trains to school, and for its future. Collegeville guarded the movement. It has earned the same watch kept over it.
Seven neighborhoods, seven stories
Acipco-Finley carries both of its names from its work. In 1905 a businesswoman named Charlotte Blair organized a new pipe company on Birmingham’s north side, and its first president, John Eagan, ran it by a rule uncommon in any era: do unto others. The company built houses, a clinic, a school, gardens — and when Eagan died in 1924, he left the whole company in trust to the people who worked there. A century later ACIPCO is still here, still owned by its employees, one of the largest pipe works in the world, and it has just committed the better part of a billion dollars to its next generation in the neighborhood.
The other name came from the great Southern Railway yard of 1915, whose concrete roundhouse — the largest ever built in Alabama — still curves beside Finley Boulevard, waiting on the neighbors campaigning to save it. Between the plant and the old yard, the neighborhood the workers built goes on: the farmers market feeding the whole city from the railyard ground, plate lunches at the same counters since the 1950s, a community garden growing across from the plant gates, and the cottages of the first pipe workers still standing on the grid. Few places anywhere have run a longer experiment in taking care of a workforce. Its next chapter belongs to the neighborhood itself.
Neighborhood association leaders, block captains, and long-time homeowners set the priorities we fund and the order we fund them in.
We convene partners monthly so that housing, schools, health, and workforce efforts reinforce each other instead of competing.
Every initiative reports against the same neighborhood-level indicators, and the full dataset is available to any resident or partner who asks.
Come work a Saturday. Homeowner repair crews, vacant lot clean-ups, and tutoring all run on volunteer hours.
Volunteer TodayCongregations, businesses, and organizations carry this plan together. If yours wants a lane, there is one open.
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