Cities Strong Foundation Invests $53,900 in West Valley City Community Resource Centers and Leadership Academy
West Valley City just proved a simple truth: the best investment in a neighborhood is the people who live there.
This month, Cities Strong Foundation committed $53,900 to West Valley City. The money does two things. It brings three new Community Resource Centers to life in the NE Granger, Central Granger, and Valley View neighborhoods. And it launches something the state hasn’t seen before: the Neighborhood Leadership Academy.
Start with the centers. West Valley City recently purchased three facilities and made them permanent public assets, a real commitment to the neighborhoods around them. Our $30,000 outfits those buildings with furnishings, technology, and classroom equipment so they can open their doors as full Community Resource Centers. This isn’t a new idea for West Valley City. It’s an old one, done right. Through myHometown, an initiative of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the city has built Utah’s longest-running neighborhood engagement network. Hundreds of residents already show up twice a week for English classes, arts and music lessons, financial literacy training, sewing classes. These new centers give that work a permanent home. With them, myHometown West Valley City now reaches more than half the residential areas in the city.
Then there’s the $23,900 for the Neighborhood Leadership Academy. This one is different. It doesn’t fund a program run for residents. It funds residents running the program themselves. Participants complete a multi-week leadership course. Then they get grant money and design their own projects, for their own streets, in their own neighborhoods.
The results speak for themselves. The inaugural 2026 class has already finished training and is executing fifteen resident-designed projects across the city. Curb addresses are being repainted for faster emergency response. Fire hydrants are being adopted and cared for. Park strips are being landscaped by the neighbors who walk past them every day. There’s a new Field Day. A new bike and roll event. A project to bring streetlights to a stretch of road that needed them. A brand-new neighborhood, Chatterleigh Meadows, forming itself from the ground up.
None of this was handed down. It was built up.
“West Valley City has become a statewide model for what neighborhood engagement can look like,” said Scott Sorensen, President and CEO of Cities Strong Foundation. “This investment is about deepening that work, giving residents better facilities and, through the Neighborhood Leadership Academy, giving them the resources to lead. Strong communities aren’t built for people. They’re built by them.”
Mayor Karen Lang put it plainly: acquiring these buildings was a commitment to West Valley City’s communities, and this investment helps ensure the spaces are ready to serve residents for generations to come.
And Randy Whitehead, City Chair of West Valley’s myHometown network, connected the two halves of this investment better than anyone. The Community Resource Centers give people a place to gather, learn, and grow. The Neighborhood Leadership Academy gives them the power to act. Together, they build a model where neighborhoods grow stronger not because an institution decided they should, but because the people who live there decided to make it so.
That is the whole theory of Cities Strong Foundation in a single city, on a single summer. Invest in the infrastructure. Trust the residents. Get out of the way.
Information about future Neighborhood Leadership Academy classes, project applications, and Community Resource Center programming will be announced in the coming months. Residents who want to get involved should reach out to West Valley City, myHometown, or Cities Strong Foundation.
Learn more at wvc-ut.gov/1789/My-Hometown-Initiative.