Relationships Before Projects
Trust grows face to face and over time, long before a grant, event, class, or construction schedule begins.
Where It Started
A Few Neighbors, a Coffee Shop, and Better Questions
York XL began in 2017 in the back room of I-ron-ic, a beloved art-and-coffee space in York’s WeCo district. The first conversations did not begin with a finished program or a promise that one organization had all the answers. They began with questions.
What if people already had dreams, skills, knowledge, and ideas, but too many barriers stood between those assets and the ability to act on them? What if stronger neighborhoods could grow by connecting people, making resources more reachable, and creating room to try things together?
Those questions became the foundation for York XL.
How We Work
Start With Assets. Make Possibility More Reachable.
Urban neighborhoods are already rich in passion, know-how, creativity, and relationships. Our role is to help move barriers out of the way and create structures through which people can keep learning, organizing, and building.
People Before Deficits
We begin with lived experience, local knowledge, existing strengths, and what people already care enough to change.
Platforms, Not One-Off Programs
We build structures that allow people to continue learning, experimenting, creating, and working together.
Value That Stays Local
We look for ways that learning, enterprise, development, and public spaces can produce lasting neighborhood benefit.
Our Mission
Empowered People Impacting Community
We bring people together to imagine and then passionately create empowered neighborhoods.
EEmpowerment
PParticipation
IInnovation
CCommunity
Where the Work Lives
Three EPIC Platforms. One Consistent Direction.
York XL’s work takes different forms, but each platform starts with what people and neighborhoods already carry and creates practical ways to build from it.
Programs such as EPIC Amigos Summer Camp, WealthScouts, Neighborhoods Built by Neighbors, Street Meets, and the Ivan and Zach Memorial Gardens live within or alongside these platforms.
EPIC Gardens
Public spaces rooted in remembrance, stewardship, gathering, beauty, and neighborhood life.
Explore EPIC Gardens →EPIC WealthBuilders
Learning, enterprise, ownership, development, and community wealth connected into one growing ecosystem.
Explore EPIC WealthBuilders →EPIC Spanish
Practical language learning designed to build confidence, conversation, and stronger community connections.
Explore EPIC Spanish →
Learning in Public
Bring People Together. Learn. Test. Improve.
York XL has grown by creating places for people to encounter new ideas and then helping turn those ideas into visible, local experiments.
Make Important Ideas Accessible
We convene neighbors, practitioners, and partners so useful ideas can enter local conversation and become shared tools.
Make Change Visible and Testable
Small demonstrations allow people to experience a possibility, respond to it, and improve the next version together.
Partnership Is Part of the Model
The Work Grows Through Shared Commitment
York XL is not trying to become the answer to every neighborhood challenge. We work with neighbors, educators, businesses, public agencies, nonprofits, volunteers, and funders who bring different knowledge and resources to the table.
The strongest partnerships do more than support an isolated project. They help build relationships and capacity that remain useful after that project ends.
Be Part of What Comes Next
There Is More Than One Way Into the Work
Explore a platform, attend a class, volunteer, share an idea, build a partnership, or help strengthen work already taking root.