Bring Back the Rainbow of Hope!

A Home Full of Love and Support

Rising Hope For Change sends help to people from different countries. We equally treat and support them in fulfilling their dreams. Visit us today and personally witness the love and passion of our workers in guiding people in need. Our team is excited to meet you!

See Our Impact

Where We Work

Rising Hope For Change is rooted in two of the most under-invested and over-burdened corners of the Philadelphia region: Southwest and West Philadelphia, and Eastern Delaware County.

We do not parachute in. We live here, we work here, and we have built our offices, programs, and partnerships in the neighborhoods we serve. This place-based commitment is the foundation of the community trust that makes our work possible — and the reason we are able to reach residents that larger, more distant institutions often cannot.

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.

Our Service Area

Our programs are concentrated in a compact, cross-jurisdictional corridor that runs from West and Southwest Philadelphia south and west into Eastern Delaware County. Within this corridor we focus our work in three connected community clusters:

Southwest Philadelphia — ZIP codes 19142 and 19143

The neighborhoods of Kingsessing, Woodland, Elmwood, Eastwick, and Cobbs Creek. Home to long-established African American families, vibrant West African and Caribbean immigrant communities, and a growing population of new arrivals. Among the highest concentrations of gun violence, child poverty, and untreated trauma in the city of Philadelphia, and among the most under-served by mainstream nonprofit and behavioral health infrastructure.

West Philadelphia — ZIP code 19151

The neighborhoods of Overbrook and the western edge of Cobbs Creek. Long-rooted Black communities sitting at the intersection of stable family blocks and corridors of severe disinvestment. A community with deep cultural memory, strong faith institutions, and significant unmet need in youth programming, violence prevention, and elder support.

Eastern Delaware County — Darby, Yeadon, Lansdowne, East Lansdowne , Sharon Hill, Chester, and surrounding boroughs

Just across the Philadelphia border, but in a different county, school district, and service system. These communities — including Darby Borough, where one of our offices is located — face many of the same structural challenges as our Philadelphia neighborhoods but with a fraction of the nonprofit infrastructure. Chester, Darby, and the adjoining boroughs include among the highest-poverty municipalities in Pennsylvania and rank persistently among the most violent in the Commonwealth on a per-capita basis.

Together, these communities form the service footprint of Rising Hope For Change — a single, connected geography that public agencies, school districts, and most regional nonprofits divide along city and county lines. We work across that line because the families do.

Why These Communities

We did not choose this service area at random. We chose it because it is where the need is greatest, the institutional response has historically been thinnest, and the opportunity for transformative, community-led change is real.

Across the ZIP codes we serve, residents face:

Elevated rates of gun violence and community trauma — including homicide, shooting injury, domestic violence, and the cumulative weight of repeated exposure to loss.
Concentrated poverty and economic exclusion — with median household incomes well below city, county, and Commonwealth averages, and child poverty rates that exceed regional benchmarks.
Limited access to behavioral health, prevention, and youth development services — particularly culturally responsive services for African, African American, Caribbean, Asian, and Latino residents.
Significant elder isolation — with older residents disproportionately vulnerable to scams, mobility loss, and disconnection from family and community life.
Disinvested schools, recreation centers, and public spaces — even as the communities themselves are rich in faith institutions, cultural organizations, civic groups, and family networks ready to be mobilized.

These are the conditions Rising Hope For Change exists to change.

Our Offices

We maintain two offices, one on each side of the city–county line, to keep our staff close to the families we serve and our partnerships easy to convene.

Philadelphia Office

1628 South 58th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19143. Located in the heart of our Southwest Philadelphia service area, within walking distance of partner faith institutions, schools, and recreation centers. Co-located with Freedom Worship Center, our long-standing primary programming partner.

Delaware County Office

3 Chester Pike, Darby, PA 19023. Located in Darby Borough, anchoring our work across Eastern Delaware County and providing a convening point for partners across Chester, Lansdowne, and surrounding communities.

Both offices function as program hubs, partner meeting spaces, and points of contact for residents seeking services, referrals, or information.

Where You'll Find Us in the Community

Our work happens far beyond our office walls. On any given week, Rising Hope For Change staff and partners can be found:

In faith community spaces and partner church facilities including Freedom Worship Center and End Time Reminder Ministries, where we run regular youth and family programming.
In public schools and school district facilities, where we deliver evidence-based prevention programming in partnership with local school districts and the School District of Philadelphia.
In municipal recreation centers and parks — including Myers Recreation Center and other sites operated by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation — where we host summer academies, community festivals, athletic programming, and resource fairs.
In libraries operated by the Free Library of Philadelphia, where we connect youth and families to literacy, technology, and cultural programming.
In community partner offices — including ACANA, Multicultural Community Family Services, Lower Chester Coalition for Women's Progress, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing / Philly CEAL — where we coordinate cross-referrals, joint events, and shared service delivery.
On the streets, sidewalks, and front porches of the neighborhoods themselves, where street outreach, door-to-door engagement, and direct community presence remain the heart of how we work.

A Cross-Jurisdictional Commitment

Most regional nonprofits work either in Philadelphia or in Delaware County — rarely both. Public agencies, foundations, and grant systems are typically organized along the same lines. But the families we serve do not live their lives along those lines. A child may attend school in Philadelphia and live with a grandparent in Darby. A young adult may work in Chester and worship in Southwest Philadelphia. A family displaced from one community by housing pressure may resettle in the other.

Rising Hope For Change is structured to follow those connections rather than be limited by them. Our two-office footprint, our cross-county partnerships, and our experience navigating both city and county systems give us a service-delivery capacity that few organizations our size can match — and a particular strategic value to funders investing in regional approaches to violence prevention, youth development, and community wellbeing.

Looking Ahead

Our service area is intentionally focused. We are not seeking to expand geographically before we have deepened our work in the communities where we are already trusted. Over the next three years, our priority is to:

Deepen our programming in our core Southwest Philadelphia ZIP codes (19142, 19143).
Expand systematically into West Philadelphia (19151) where partner relationships are already in place.
Build our Eastern Delaware County presence into a fully resourced second hub serving Darby, Lansdowne, Chester, and the surrounding boroughs.
Sustain the partnership infrastructure — faith institutions, schools, recreation centers, libraries, cultural organizations, and resident leaders — that makes everything we do possible.

We grow where the community asks us to grow, at a pace our quality of programming can support.

Partner With Us in This Place

If your foundation, agency, or company is investing in Southwest Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, or Eastern Delaware County — or in the cross-jurisdictional space between them — Rising Hope For Change is a credible, community-trusted partner with the staffing, partnerships, and track record to deliver.

For grant inquiries, partnership conversations, or site visits to our programs, contact Daniel H. Lendeh, Executive Director, at daniel.lendeh@rhfc.info or 267-969-8729.