Oneida Square and the surrounding Arts District sit in the geographic heart of the City of Utica, in a neighborhood battling neglect yet brimming with potential.Cornerstone Community Church is privileged to call this community our home and because we believe that there is no greater cause than to love one’s neighbor, we, as a church are committed to being good neighbors in Oneida Square and The Arts District of West Utica through our community outreach ministry called The Oneida Square Project: An Ungated Community.

Our goal is to encourage and support a more just and vibrant community in Oneida Square and the Arts District through economic development and the reconciling of people to one another across all barriers of culture, race and class. Our desire is to love our neighbors through four key focus areas:

1. Family Support: We believe that strong, healthy families are the cement that holds the city together. Therefore, we are committed to strengthening the families in Oneida Square and beyond by offering parenting workshops that will teach nurturing skills to parents from birth through adolescence. We are currently working with the Family Nurturing Center to train leaders and develop workshops.

2. Home preservation: We are working with neighborhood and city leaders to promote responsible landlords and tenants, home rehabilitation, environmentally friendly deconstruction of blighted structures and neighborhood beautification.
Our current rehabilitation project is 621 Henry Street. We are also in the process of purchasing a vacant lot from the City to create a community flower garden and maintaining trash receptacles to help decrease litter in our neighborhood.

3. Economic Development: We believe that a healthy neighborhood is a diverse neighborhood. With that in mind, our immediate goal is to promote middle income owner residency in Oneida Square recognizing that while GroWest and other HUD funded agencies are promoting low income owner residency there is currently no organized effort to promote or assist middle income residency in our city.
We are in the process of assisting the relocation of multiple middle income families to the neighborhood.

4. Community Cooperation: We are working to bring together government agencies, businesses and not-for-profits already serving our neighborhood in order to maximize cooperation in promoting the growth of Oneida Square and West Utica.
We are currently working with Johnson Park Center, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, GroWest, The Municipal Housing Authority, Habitat For Humanity, The Family Nurturing Center and the City of Utica office of Urban and Economic Development.