On Saturday, October 17, 2026, the parking lot and halls of the Huntersville Community Center at 830 Goff Street will fill with folding tables, folding chairs, and the particular hum of a neighborhood doing business with itself. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., NeighborCare Norfolk will set up shop in the Olde Huntersville neighborhood, in partnership with the Olde Huntersville Empowerment Coalition. There is no ticket, no gate, no registration. Residents can drop in, wander between resource tables, sit through a workshop, collect a bag of food, and leave whenever they like.
That open-door format is the point. NeighborCare Norfolk is not a single festival or a one-off outreach push. It is a recurring, place-based service model that the City of Norfolk has built into its regular operations, designed to carry city agencies, health providers, and workforce partners directly into neighborhoods rather than waiting for residents to find them downtown. According to the city's own description, the events exist to support health, safety, and overall well-being, and to give residents a chance to meet local leaders, learn about available programs, and share their voice about what matters most in their community. The Huntersville edition promises fun activities, food giveaways, free resources, and free workshops.
The program has become prominent enough that Norfolk leaned on it in its successful bid to be named a 2026 All-America City by the National Civic League. In the city's application materials, NeighborCare appears under the banner "Belonging Powered by People," described as having been developed in direct response to resident feedback. The National Civic League's profile of Norfolk notes that the city institutionalized NeighborCare as a recurring, place-based service coordination model operating in neighborhoods with high Social Vulnerability Index scores, and that each event follows a structured cycle of planning, execution, and debriefing, guided by what the city calls the NeighborCare Playbook. In other words, the tables at Huntersville are not improvised. They are the product of a deliberate system, one that treats a Saturday resource fair as civic infrastructure rather than a photo opportunity.
That framing matters in a neighborhood like Olde Huntersville, which has spent decades being studied, written about, and occasionally written off. Huntersville is one of Norfolk's oldest and most historically intact communities. Wikipedia, drawing on local historical accounts, describes it as one of Norfolk's "most intact settlements remaining from the late 19th century," and notes that it "is unique because it was not planned by a company or commission, but developed over time." It sits just north of downtown, bounded roughly by Church Street and Elmwood Cemetery to the west, Tidewater Drive to the east, and the Lafayette River to the north. It grew organically, block by block, rather than according to a developer's plat.
The neighborhood's modern story is harder. A 2024 analysis of incarceration data reported by local outlets found that Olde Huntersville had the highest incarceration rate of nine Norfolk neighborhoods studied, at 5,690 per 100,000 people, more than five times the city's overall rate. Neighborhood data aggregators consistently rank it among the lowest-income communities in Norfolk. It is the kind of place where a free workshop and a bag of groceries are not amenities but practical necessities, and where a city that shows up in person is making a statement.
The Olde Huntersville Empowerment Coalition, the city's partner for the October event, is the latest chapter in a long tradition of residents organizing for their own neighborhood. The coalition's roots reach back to the Olde Huntersville Civic League and to the Olde Huntersville Development Corp., which, according to a 1996 Virginian-Pilot account preserved in Virginia Tech's archives, started in 1984 as a spinoff of the civic league. It was co-founded by Jennings and her daughter Bea Garvin when they and other civic league members joined Jim Rouse's National Enterprise Neighborhood Network. That development corporation later became defunct in 2007 after, as Wikipedia records, owing more than $245,000 it had misspent in violation of federal regulations, a cautionary tale about the fragility of community development work.
The empowerment coalition that carries the neighborhood's banner today is a younger organization, tax-exempt since February 2022 according to ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, and small enough that it files the IRS's short-form 990-N, which is permitted for charities with annual revenue under $50,000. Its executive director is Beatrice Garvin-Thompson, a name that recurs across the neighborhood's civic history and a co-founder of the Olde Huntersville Civic League. Since October 2024, faculty members from Old Dominion University's Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience have been collaborating with Garvin-Thompson and the coalition on community initiatives in Huntersville, work that has included a kickoff event celebrating a grant. In a 2026 television interview with WTKR, Garvin-Thompson described the neighborhood's revitalization as more than housing, pointing to an effort to convert a green space into what she called a cognitive park on the street she refers to as the neighborhood's impact street.
That is the context into which NeighborCare arrives on October 17. The city's own framing is that Norfolk has shifted, over the past decade, from transactional service delivery to shared governance, embedding residents in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of programs that affect their lives. The All-America City application language puts it plainly: engagement is no longer episodic, it is structural. Whether a resident comes for the food giveaway, the workshops, the chance to buttonhole a city official, or simply because the community center is a short walk from home, the event is built to be low-stakes and high-access.
For anyone who needs accommodation, the city asks for seven days' advance notice. Requests for a sign language interpreter, large-print materials, or other assistance, and general questions about the event, go through the Department of Military and Community Affairs, reachable via Kendric Nowling at [email protected] or (757) 675-4041, or Travon Cuffee at [email protected] or (757) 685-4291.
The event runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Huntersville Community Center, 830 Goff Street, Norfolk, VA 23504. It is free and open to the public, with no ticketing required.