Connect Community

Houston, TX

Gulfton/Sharpstown is the most diverse neighborhood in the most diverse city in the country. However, due to years of disinvestment, this largely immigrant and refugee neighborhood has become an area of concentrated poverty. In 2016, Connect Community was created to bring organizations and local residents together to collaborate, align their efforts, and mobilize a broader network of assets to meet needs and strengthen the overall community.

Connect Community Impact Zone

Over the past few decades, cheap rents have attracted many first-generation immigrants to settle in Sharpstown/Gulfton. As a result, this has become the most densely populated and culturally diverse community in Houston. It is also one of the most economically challenged.

Connect Community focuses its efforts and measures its impact within a delineated geographic area called the Impact Zone, which encompasses an approximately two-mile radius around the Connect campus at 6700 Bellaire Boulevard. Within this Impact Zone, approximately 65% of the residents are from Latin America and 20% are refugees from around the world.

View our impact zone

Connect Community Initiatives

In the Connect Community effort, the collaborating partner organizations include public school systems, social service providers, adult ESL and workforce development programs, career centers, refugee resettlement agencies, employers, and government agencies, as well as the social support networks of residents themselves. This broad-based effort shapes community initiatives.

Find out more about the community initiatives