In a significant step toward strengthening community engagement, the Western Hills High School Alumni Association has merged with LVTRise. This partnership aims to expand outreach efforts, enhance educational support, and provide greater resources to students and families in the Las Vegas Trail area. The merger will enable more mentorship programs, scholarships, and career readiness initiatives for local youth.

Cook Children’s Health Care System and JPS Health Network are teaming up for the first time to bring a new health care center to west Fort Worth. The health systems broke ground Tuesday on the Las Vegas Trail neighborhood health center at the corner of Calmont Avenue and Cherry Lane.

With Christmas and the holidays just around the corner, LVTRise is kicking off its Christmas Angel program at its annual RISE Luncheon on Tuesday, November 7, at 11:30 a.m. at Ridglea Country Club, 3700 Bernie Anderson Ave.

Younger readers likely don’t know the acronym BRAC. But if you were alive and kicking in local government in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the last thing you wanted to hear was that BRAC was coming to your town.

When Haley Ballenger came to Fort Worth from Houston in 2018, she had no friends and nothing for herself to enjoy. Her children were young, so she didn’t have time to go out and socialize. She started a Facebook group, called Fort Worth Weird Moms Club, to connect with other mothers in the city — it caught on quickly, she said.

A new health care center is headed to Fort Worth’s Las Vegas Trail (LVT) neighborhood, and it’ll be a team effort between the Cook Children’s and John Peter Smith (JPS) health systems. The two hospitals announced the new facility in a joint news release on Tuesday, calling it a “first-of-its-kind partnership.”

“Las Vegas Trail is 1% of the city of Fort Worth, but it’s 4% of the crime,” District 3 Councilman Michael Crain said. “So, the people that live here, and there are some really good people who live here and call Las Vegas Trail home, but they’re surrounded by crime and other things you shouldn’t have in a neighborhood.”

City Council has chosen the Las Vegas Trail area to receive the next round of neighborhood improvement strategy funds. Beginning in January, the city will work with the community to decide how to spend $3.5 million to improve residents’ quality of life.

Programs that help address the local issues around housing, health, and education will be able to scale, helping even more people through a multi-year grant from Bank of America. LVTRise and Harmony Community Development Corporation (CDC) have been named as the 2021 Bank of America Neighborhood Builders® awardees for their work in the Dallas-Ft. Worth community addressing these issues.

Violent crime is trending down, Trinity Metro is running new express routes through the neighborhood, and a newly passed public improvement district is expected to bring in an extra $300,000 to support public safety and community improvements.

Fort Worth leaders, community activists and others gathered to discuss crime statistics, upcoming projects and the current state of the Las Vegas Trail neighborhood at Birchman Baptist Church, 9100 N. Normandale St.

Violent crime in the Las Vegas Trail area is down 22% in 2021 compared with the first nine months of 2019, according to the Fort Worth Police Department. It’s the result of an increased police presence and residents working with law enforcement, police and community leaders said.

Though Las Vegas Trail itself is only about a mile long, it looms large in the history of Fort Worth and in most of our psyches.

Last March’s sharp economic downturn left Willie Rankin and the 35 volunteers of LVTRise with an urgent new mission: helping to feed a growing unemployed West side population and hundreds of newly home-bound public school students.

As part of that agreement with the city, LVTRise Inc. agreed to split the cost of improvements to the community center equally.

Underserved populations often have difficulties accessing central sites for COVID-19 vaccines and navigating the vaccine registration process. To address those problems, MedStar, LVTRise and Tarrant County Public Health partnered to bring the coronavirus vaccine to the Las Vegas Trail community.

LVTRise celebrates next phase of acquired community center taking it from plans to reality.

An effort to turn a former YMCA into a community center for the Las Vegas Trail area is moving along with a new executive director.