During a recent visit to Codman Square Health Center, I was chided by a staff member who noted that whenever she sees me there, I am taking a group on a tour. She’s probably right. Over my 47 years of involvement in Codman Square, I’ve given hundreds of tours, not just of the health center, but of Codman Square itself.

People have come from many countries and dozens of states, and the tours continued after I left daily work in Codman Square. In fact, I’ll be giving a walking tour of the square in July to Fellows from the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy.

The Walczak Tour tells a story of residents re-envisioning their down-and-out community and rebuilding it. It’s an account of the title for July’s walking tour – “Nonprofit innovation: The Codman Square story.”

Codman Square has an interesting story to share. Once the town center of Dorchester, where its Town Hall was located, it became a major commercial center in pre-annexation Dorchester, and remained a vibrant business area into the 1970s.

Then, a combination of massive population loss, disinvestment, demographic change, and general urban decay sent the Square into a tailspin. Abandonment and arson left the area looking like the definition of blight. In 1983, a majority of candidates for mayor announced that, if elected, they would “rebuild Codman Square.”

The fact that Codman Square was the “border” between Black and white Dorchester made multi-racial efforts complicated, especially during the desegregation (busing) years, but the Square was a place where people on all sides learned to work together, and the nonprofit agencies produced by the residents are the embodiment of their efforts to improve and redevelop the neighborhood.

Recently, the City of Boston started a neighborhoods promotion campaign called “All Inclusive Boston (allinclusivebos.com).” In addition to typical tourist information, the campaign invites people to “explore like a local” by visiting the neighborhoods. The website information mainly includes restaurants, but there is much more in a place like Codman Square, which came through an existential crisis, and emerged, largely through actions by its residents and nonprofit agencies, to be a vibrant center of community life, a place with an array of services that include education, health care, housing, food, and fitness.

My tour starts at 450 Washington St., the Codman Square Health Center’s (CSHC) Wellness and Fitness Center, where Daily Table, a nonprofit grocery store that sells only nutritious food at about 2/3 the cost of a regular grocery store, has been operating for six years. Daily Table may be the only grocery store in America where everything sold is good for you, and where one can get enough food for a week on your EBT card.

Daily Table shares the building with a Teaching Kitchen, operated jointly by CSHC and Daily Table, which offers free cooking classes to local residents and groups. Adjacent to the kitchen is HealthWorks at Codman, a fitness center for women and children that opened in 2008.

Membership is defined to be affordable to all and has sliding fee rates based on income. Across the hall, the Health Center operates a free tax preparation clinic in the building during tax season, generating millions of dollars for local residents.

Heading south, we pass the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation (CSNDC), the result of 1981 merger of the Codman Square CDC and WE CAN, both 1970s housing programs. Codman Square NDC has built 1,300 affordable housing units in the Codman Square area, while working with tenants on job training, small business development, community agriculture, and the like. It is promoting the greening of the square with LEED certified buildings and buildings with solar panels, and it is earning a designation as an eco-district as it advocates for sustainable building.

Codman Square residents have led its revitalization since coming to terms with the community’s need to re-create itself after being radically transformed in the 1960s and 1970s. A key organization that has led the community’s efforts at envisioning its future and building a culture of cooperation among the communities and organizations that populate the area is the Codman Square Neighborhood Council, which was created in the 1980s and is still going strong. Currently, it is taking the lead on remaking the Codman Common so that it includes both current space and the land owned by the Second Church, a quintessential New England meeting house built in 1805 with timbers brought from Maine (then part of Massachusetts), and notable for its Paul Revere Bell and the solar panels on its roof.

At the intersection that is Codman Square, one building that faces it used to have a the address Zero Codman Square. It is the Great Hall, formerly the Codman Square Branch Library, and the early site of the Codman Square Health Center. The Hall building was in terrible condition when the health center took it over in 1979, and over the years it has preserved the main reading room as the Great Hall, which includes a stage, as the center of civic life for the Codman Square community, and the location of Neighborhood Council meetings. Great communities have strong organizations that value cooperation, with great places to meet and organize to prompt that cooperation, and the Great Hall is such a place.

Immediately after the Great Hall is the main clinical building of the Codman Square Health Center, organized in 1975, and Codman Academy Charter Public School (CACS), started in 2001. Codman Academy was, and may still be, the only school located within a medical facility. As such, it has been written about in numerous journals, and is the model for the Chan-Zuckerberg education initiative.

As a matter of fact, Priscilla Chan did a pediatric rotation in Codman Square several years ago to study how the school and health center interact. Codman Academy high school students walk the same halls as medical professionals, eat in the same dining room, and have opportunities to gain internships and jobs at the health center.

Codman Academy’s K-8 school is located across the street in the 1899 Lithgow Building. The interior school design is a very early example of “trauma informed” architecture, and includes a dance studio, library, art studio, and dining room. Both schools have chef-prepared food every day, and CACS has been considered one of the healthiest schools in Massachusetts, due to its focus on all things health related.

Codman Academy is also spearheading greening initiatives for the square, with LEED certified buildings, adding beehives to the roof of the K-8 school and helping to create nine raised-bed rain gardens on the roadways. It will soon be creating a healing micro-forest on a pie-shaped piece of land on Norfolk Street.

Codman Square Health Center is one of the larger employers in Dorchester today. And with more than 100,000 annual visits to clinical programs, it is one of the largest health centers in Boston. Open seven days a week, it offers a comprehensive list of services beyond medical care, including behavioral health, dental, eye care, and many auxiliary services.

CSHC has also been a catalyst for community development, partnering in the development of the services at 450 Washington Street, involved in not only the founding of Codman Academy, but also the Edward Kennedy Health Careers Academy, and other innovations, such as BOLD Teens, which organized teens to get an ordinance passed in Boston to forbid pharmacies from selling tobacco products, and has sponsored farmers markets in the square. Then there’s the Clemente Program, which offers college instruction to low-income residents in the humanities, with the goal of encouraging full matriculation into college.

Continuing our tour, we walk down Centre Street to the Epiphany School, founded in 1997, which is both a middle school and an Early Learning Center. An institution at which all students are on full scholarships, Epiphany offers remarkable full service educational programs to lower income students and their families. Its new ELC starts at infancy with a program that involves the entire family with the goal of ensuring that participants are ready for kindergarten. Epiphany has inspired 19 other like schools around the country.

All of these remarkable institutions fall within a ten-block area, making Codman Square a center for both urban revitalization and nonprofit innovation. Visitors from other countries have generally assumed that the institutions and buildings they see were provided by the government, but, for the most part, these organizations built themselves up over many years by raising money with the support of community boards made of community residents.

These are the stories that have made Codman Square a must-see place for many hundreds of visitors over the years. They tell of a multi-racial community that hit rock bottom, but with good community leadership, a clear vision for the future, effective organizing, and the creation of organizations that collaborate rather than compete and provide solutions to the needs of the residents, built itself back up. It’s an inspirational tale for other communities around the world.

All Inclusive Boston should add to its marketing of neighborhoods by including such histories and the work done by residents to improve their communities. Coming out of the pandemic, 2021 is a good year for Bostonians to learn about the vibrant neighborhoods that surround us.

Bill Walczak is a Dorchester resident and the former president and CEO of Codman Square Health Center.