Prosperity Park, in east Oak Cliff, is desolate until Anthony Lazon arrives with homemade macaroni and watermelon lemonade. He honks the horn of his 15-passenger van as it rumbles into a nearby field off Bonnie View Road. Three boys who had been waving water bottles for sale at passing cars stop what they’re doing and come running.
“What you got today?” one of them asks, striding around a painted shipping container at the park’s edge. He notices three coolers.
“Dude!” he shouts to his two friends. “They got watermelon lemonade!”
The teen assumes control, scooping bowls of vegan pasta Lazon cooked with cashew cheese and soy crumbles and offering them to all who stroll into Prosperity Park this Tuesday evening in mid-May. “You want some mac and cheese?” he calls out. The other two sprint past the tables to a purple, black, and blue basketball court that is soon packed with about a dozen other kids. Lazon opens a shipping container, revealing multicolored playground balls, brooms, a folding table, and stacks of canned food. He unlocks a wooden gate to two porta-potties.
This is how Prosperity Park bursts to life on most evenings. Kids and parents venture in from every direction, the adults sitting at black picnic tables under a shaded canopy while the children play. “This is a connector,” says Lazon, who leads Dallas For Change, a social justice and mutual aid group.
A year ago, the site at the corner of Prosperity Avenue and Bonnie View Road, no larger than a quarter of an acre, only contained piles of concrete. Community organizers and code enforcement had long known about the violence and blight near this plot of land, a suspicion verified by crime data and 311 requests. In 2024 and 2025, police reported one homicide, 70 aggravated assaults, and 18 robberies in a quarter-mile radius around the park, according to a Child Poverty Action Lab analysis. In response, nonprofits and mutual aid groups spent the last year building and programming Prosperity Park to transform the block.
“It takes everybody on every level to change a community,” says Patrick Averhart, who led the effort as the Child Poverty Action Lab’s senior director of neighborhood insights. “You want it to feel safe, but you don’t want to act like you’re a part of the system that’s been neglecting them for a long time.”
(The Lab Report is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab. Our newsroom operates with editorial independence.)
Averhart wasn’t surprised by the story told in the data. He grew up at his grandmother’s house about 2 miles from here and rode bikes with friends through the neighborhood. He used to be like the kids at Prosperity Park, he says, constantly looking for a spot to play basketball or hang out. Today, he counts seven empty lots within view of the park, mixed in with some vacant commercial structures and apartments with boarded-up windows. Research shows such conditions are common in areas with regular violent crime. “It’s always been this,” Averhart says. “One of the heaviest divested areas in the city, like straight up and down.”
The families who live nearby say there aren’t many recreational amenities to keep kids busy. The street in front of the park is lined with modest traditional homes behind white picket and chain-link fencing. Around the corner is the Peoples El Shaddai Village, long known in the neighborhood as “Butter Beans,” an apartment complex that has attracted media attention for crime and code complaints. Less than a mile away are the Volara Apartments, which police officials for decades regarded as the most violent complex in Dallas. (The police department has zeroed in on Volara the last four years, with mixed results.)
Averhart joined the Child Poverty Action Lab in 2023, and over the next two years, took on what he calls the “easy part:” helping clear trash and blight while hosting fresh produce drives to get to know the neighborhood. Averhart wanted to open something more permanent, but he wasn’t sure where it would go.
Last year, Dallas code compliance employees directed Averhart to plots of land where 311 complaints and citations had piled up, and where they suspected the landowner might be cooperative. Prosperity Park was at the time a grassy field whose only defining feature was a jagged mound of rubble. But it is surrounded by homes and apartments, and W.W. Bushman Elementary is a 10-minute walk away.
Averhart and the city pitched the landowner on licensing the land. The owner wouldn’t have to pay a cent, and the upkeep wouldn’t be his responsibility. “We’re scratching each others’ back,” Averhart says. “We’re doing some good here, it’s not like we’re selling vice, liquor, tobacco.”
The nonprofit VolunteerNow coordinated design, construction, landscaping, and some artwork, says Nicole Young, the group’s director of corporate engagement. Another nonprofit, Not My Son, oversees the park’s day-to-day programming and larger events. “It’s in a community that is unfortunately ridden with some crime,” says Tramonica Brown, Not My Son’s founder, “but we were all up for the challenge.”
Teams from both organizations built trust and relationships by surveying more than 75 households. The neighbors wanted a “third space” for kids, Young says, recalling one woman who couldn’t name a place other than her porch that she felt was safe for her two granddaughters to play. Families also said they needed access to fresh produce, financial help with emergency expenses, and hygiene products. The organizations tweaked plans based on what they learned in the surveys, shifting from a soccer field to a basketball court, for instance. “Folks came together and truly curated what the community asked for,” Brown says. “I think that’s the beautiful part.”
Two shipping containers were converted into an air-conditioned classroom and a storage space, both painted white with small black stripes. The nonprofit Oak Cliff Veggie Project planted nine raised garden beds beside a gravel path near the seating area, basketball court, and a space for hopscotch. Yellow flowers have begun to bud. “This park is for all,” a sign reads, “keep it clean.”
Unveiled in January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, organizers now visit the park nearly every day. Not My Son volunteers come weekly to play with the neighborhood kids and offer their parents utility assistance, job training, and budgeting help. The children, Brown says, are “very much so in charge.” They’ll beat the organizers to the park when they spot their cars, the same question on their lips: “What are we doing today?” The kids serve food, set up tables, and clear trash; Brown believes these chores teach them to be community leaders. Not My Son also plans to provide summer youth programming. “This really serves as a hub of both hope and resources all at the same time,” says Brown.
Prosperity Park became the second “transformative change site” Averhart has overseen in the last year. The other, called Red Bird Landing, a 1.4-acre recreational space off West Camp Wisdom and South Westmoreland roads, launched last June and is surrounded by businesses and motels, posing an entirely different set of challenges. The effort has drawn the attention of far larger organizations. FIFA agreed to build a mini soccer pitch at the Red Bird space ahead of the World Cup. “I was really proud to see the transformation that came over there,” says Council member Zarin Gracey, whose district includes Red Bird.
Averhart says the sites are “low cost, high return.” The Child Poverty Action Lab provided grants to the organizers for construction and programming. In total, Red Bird Landing cost around $230,000, and Prosperity Park about $370,000. Averhart’s goal is to hand off both sites by 2028 to community groups along with some funding to cover programming.
“This really serves as a hub of both hope and resources all at the same time.”
Tramonica Brown, founder of the nonprofit Not My Son.
But change hasn’t been immediate. At Prosperity Park, Averhart installed security bars over the container windows after five boys broke in to plug a generator into an AC unit and smoke weed. Later, he discovered a boy, about 14 years old, sleeping in one container. He learned the boy had missed 21 days of school and was kicked out of his home. Averhart connected the teen with the nonprofit For Oak Cliff, whose leaders took him in and met with his family.
Sometimes, incidents are more serious. In the spring, Lazon had to hide with eight kids behind a shipping container after a man fired a gun into the apartment complex across the street. A few weeks later, in early May, a 28-year-old man was fatally shot in front of Prosperity Park and a carjacking occurred days later, according to community organizers.
Lazon looks out for the kids; he sees himself as an older brother. Families feel safe to let their children out, he says, because they know he’ll keep watch. “It sucks that every other day, they can’t come out here and just enjoy the park,” Lazon says. Few families joined Lazon in the weeks following the violence. But he kept showing up, and eventually they returned.
“I always go back to the fact that it really doesn’t take much,” Lazon says, “just showing up consistently with a smile on your face, a little bit of food, something to drink.”
Residents have taken ownership of the space. Rachel Adams, 34, lives in an apartment across the street with her husband, their 10-year-old son, and their mini dachshund, Elsa. Adams says her family moved here about six months ago and was amazed at how the grass-covered lot had become a community park. Now, they act like watchmen, alerting Averhart to every incident and cleaning up litter.
Adams says occasional gunshots make her son, who has autism, panic each time his father steps outside. The park brings needed joy, she says. “The site really became a blessing for us and the kids,” she says. She watches them joke around and play basketball, laughing at their competitiveness. She’s made them snow cones and lets Elsa sprint over as the kids’ eyes light up.
Watching the children play has become a pastime for Anthony Nichols, too. The 61-year-old has lived here for decades. He visits the park on weekends with his 3-year-old granddaughter, who taught him how to use the musical instruments and mini telescope. It makes him think back to when he played and swam as a kid at Glendale Park, about 3.5 miles away. “We needed that,” he says.
The site’s physical transformation is one step in a much longer process. Averhart still stops by every weekday to pick up trash, check for break-ins, spray for wasps, and fix anything awry, from detached shade covers to splotches of graffiti and cracked windows. Organizers set up shop most days of the week. Families venture out when they can and feel safe to do so, their comfort growing gradually.
“It’s going to take time,” says Brown, Not My Son’s founder. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will the turnaround of a community. You got to put the work in, and you’ll see the fruits of your labor the more and more you stick to your guns and build consistency.”
As for the kids? Well, the space is now theirs.
On that Tuesday in mid-May, the apartment shooting seems a distant memory. The children leap onto tables, drum on the park’s instruments, race around the garden, and bounce basketballs bigger than their heads on the multicolored court. They take turns strapping on Lazon’s GoPro. “Maybe he’ll be a photographer,” Lazon says about a boy who asks for his camera each week.
Before the sun sets, Lazon hands the kids brooms to sweep gravel off the court. They make a game of it, jostling over who gets to brush the rocks first. Lazon watches them finish from one of the shaded tables. Before leaving, they have a new request: Spaghetti and meatballs. The children trust he’ll be back.
Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. kelli@labreportdallas.com.