Innovative Way of Helping Our Community

Show Your Care for the Future Generation

We offer an array of services to develop the skills that an individual can use for the future. At Rising Hope For Change, we believe that helping people discover their potential is one step to prepare them for the battles in life.

Rising Hope For Change conducts regular training sections that inspires and fires people into unleashing their full potentials and opening the doors of possibilities. Our team provides all the resources needed to improve and help them in pursuing what they want. We treat every individual with no discrimination, especially in providing our services. Turn to the list below to see what we offer.

Rising Hope For Change is here to help in these areas:

Providing educational services to the underprivileged here in the United States and Africa
Provision of developmental skill programs like computer training, job trainings, etc.

Entrepreneurship empowerment, for the low income individuals to develop their entrepreneurial abilities through financial education

By doing this, we know that we’re one step closer to a world. Let us stand for every person’s right and be with them in every milestone to pursue their dreams!

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What We Do

Rising Hope For Change builds safer streets, stronger families, and brighter futures across Southwest Philadelphia and Eastern Delaware County.

We are a community-rooted, evidence-driven nonprofit working at the intersection of violence prevention, youth development, substance abuse prevention, and community wellbeing. Through trauma-informed programming, deep partnerships, and direct outreach in the neighborhoods where we live and serve, we transform conditions that drive harm — and create lasting pathways to opportunity for the children, families, and elders too often left behind.

The Challenge We Address

The neighborhoods we serve — ZIP codes 19142, 19143, and 19151 in Southwest and West Philadelphia, and adjoining communities in Eastern Delaware County — rank among the most under-resourced in our region. Residents face elevated rates of gun violence, untreated trauma, opioid and substance use, youth disconnection, isolated elders, and chronic disinvestment in the institutions that hold communities together.

These conditions are not inevitable. They are the result of decades of structural neglect — and they can be changed when local organizations, schools, faith communities, and public partners work together with discipline, evidence, and the trust of the people they serve. That is what Rising Hope For Change exists to do.

Our Four Pillars

Our work is organized around four interconnected pillars. Together, they form an integrated community-wellbeing strategy — not a collection of standalone programs.

1. Violence Prevention

We disrupt cycles of community and interpersonal violence through street outreach, mentoring, conflict-resolution programming, mental health awareness campaigns, and direct engagement with youth and young adults at heightened risk. Our work is informed by the principles of Community Violence Intervention (CVI), trauma-informed care, and collective efficacy — the research-backed understanding that neighborhoods grow safer when residents are organized, connected, and resourced to act on their own behalf.

2. Youth Development

We invest in young people through summer academies, athletic programming (cycling, swimming, organized sports), arts and cultural enrichment, academic support, and leadership development. Our youth programming is grounded in the Positive Youth Development (PYD) framework, which builds the competence, confidence, character, connection, caring, and contribution young people need to thrive.

3. Substance Abuse Prevention

We deliver evidence-based prevention programming in partnership with local school districts, including the nationally recognized LifeSkills Training (LST) curriculum — a program shown to reduce tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and opioid use among adolescents by up to 80 percent. Our prevention work meets young people where they are, before substance use takes hold.

4. Community Wellbeing

We strengthen the social fabric through resource fairs, family workshops, food distributions, mental health awareness walks, cultural festivals, and dedicated programming for elders. Healthy communities are not built by emergency response alone; they are built by everyday investments in connection, dignity, and shared celebration.

Our Signature Programs

Community United: Violence Prevention and Youth Empowerment Initiative

Our flagship two-year initiative, supported through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency's Violence Intervention and Prevention Program. Community United integrates street outreach, youth mentoring, family support, mental health programming, and community mobilization across Southwest Philadelphia and Eastern Delaware County — designed to serve 5,000 to 10,000 community members annually through awareness and engagement activities and 400 to 500 youth and families through direct services over the project period.

Rising Hope Summer Youth Academy

A multi-week summer enrichment program for youth in ZIP codes 19142, 19143, and 19151, combining athletic programming (cycling, swimming, sports), academic enrichment, leadership development, and cultural exposure. The Academy is designed to keep young people safe, engaged, and growing during the months of greatest risk for community violence and disconnection.

LifeSkills Training Substance Abuse Prevention Program

A 24-month evidence-based prevention partnership with three local school districts, delivering the Botvin LifeSkills Training curriculum to middle-school students. The program builds personal, social, and resistance skills that protect young people from substance use, violence, and other risk behaviors.

SAMHSA ReCAST Project — Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma

As a trusted community partner on the federal SAMHSA ReCAST Project, in partnership with the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS) and Temple University, RHFC delivers culturally responsive resilience-building programming for youth and families affected by community trauma. Programming includes structured youth workshops, art- and creativity-based therapeutic sessions, peer dialogue, and direct connection to behavioral health support.

Rising Hope 250 — One Philly Heritage & Unity Festival

A free community festival at Myers Recreation Center marking America's 250th anniversary through a Southwest Philadelphia lens — celebrating the cultures, histories, and contributions of the African, African American, Caribbean, Asian, and Latino communities that call this region home. Presented in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia, ACANA, Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the School District of Philadelphia, the festival includes legacy components — a permanent mural and an oral history archive — that extend its impact long after the day itself.

Elders' Safety and Wellbeing Programming

Supported by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, our elders' programming addresses the safety, isolation, and wellbeing of older residents in Southwest Philadelphia, with home check-ins, transportation support, scam-prevention education, and intergenerational connection events.

Gun Violence and Addiction Awareness Walks

Annual community mobilization events that bring residents, faith leaders, public officials, survivors, and youth together in public witness — building the visibility, solidarity, and collective resolve that the research on collective efficacy identifies as central to safer neighborhoods.

Workshops and Food Distributions

Regular community workshops paired with food distributions that address immediate material need while creating points of contact for ongoing engagement with families across the service area.

How We Work

Rising Hope For Change is led by people from the communities we serve. Our work is grounded in five operating commitments:

Evidence-based. Every major program draws from rigorously evaluated frameworks — Positive Youth Development, Community Violence Intervention, Trauma-Informed Care, Collective Efficacy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, LifeSkills Training, and arts-based therapeutic approaches — adapted with care to the realities of Southwest Philadelphia and Eastern Delaware County.

Trauma-informed. Our staff and partners are trained to recognize and respond to the trauma that shapes the lives of so many residents in our service area. We do not retraumatize. We build environments of safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness, and empowerment.

Community-led. Our programming is shaped with — not for — the residents we serve. Youth Planning Committees, parent advisory input, and elder consultation are not symbolic; they hold genuine decision-making authority over the programs that affect their lives.

Partnership-driven. We do not duplicate. We connect, convene, and collaborate — extending our reach and quality through the institutions already trusted in our neighborhoods.

Fiscally disciplined. We steward every dollar with the rigor required of an organization in active grant relationships with federal, state, and local funders. Our budgets are tight, our records are clean, and our reporting is on time.

Our Partners

Rising Hope For Change works in active partnership with a growing network of public, educational, faith-based, philanthropic, and community organizations, including:

Philadelphia Parks & Recreation
Free Library of Philadelphia
School District of Philadelphia
Temple University
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing / Philly CEAL
Multicultural Community Family Services (MCFS)
Lower Chester Coalition for Women's Progress (LCCWP)
Freedom Worship Center
End Time Reminder Ministries

Our institutional funders and partners include the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Drug-Free Communities Support Program), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) — ReCAST Initiative through DBHIDS — and the City of Philadelphia 2026 Neighborhood Celebration Grants Fund, among others.

Why Invest In Rising Hope For Change

Funders and donors who invest in Rising Hope For Change invest in:

A proven, community-trusted operator with active grant relationships at the federal, state, and local level and a clean record of programmatic and fiscal compliance.
Evidence-based programming built on the most rigorously studied frameworks in youth development, violence prevention, and substance abuse prevention — adapted with cultural humility to the communities we serve.
Measurable outcomes tied to clear performance indicators, reported transparently to funders and the public.
Lasting impact in some of the most under-invested ZIP codes in the Philadelphia region — where every dollar travels further because it is paired with deep partnerships, in-kind community resources, and the unpaid labor of residents who refuse to give up on their neighborhoods.

Support Our Work

Your investment funds summer academies that keep youth safe, school-based prevention that reaches students before crisis, street outreach that interrupts violence, and elders' programming that protects the most isolated members of our community. Every gift is tax-deductible. EIN: 82-2603957.

For institutional giving, grant inquiries, or partnership conversations, contact Daniel H. Lendeh, Executive Director, at daniel.lendeh@rhfc.info or 267-969-8729.