About DASH

Positively impacting lives

If success is to be defined in human terms, DASH can lift up several families as examples of how their neighborhood revitalization efforts have impacted lives for the better.

Dana Squillante: "I needed a neighborhood."
Dana Squillante was 11 when her family moved to the Hillside neighborhood in 1969. Her memories of growing up there evoke images of Norman Rockwell paintings.

“The Callaway Educational building was right around the corner and we’d cut across the backyards to get there,” she recalls. “We lived at the pool all summer, and on the way home we’d stop by the drugstore at Hillside for lemon sours. It was wonderful.”

Eventually Squillante had children of her own and moved to the outskirts of town. Two decades later, she longed for the sense of community she’d grown up knowing.

“About that time I saw a DASH commercial on TV,” she recalls. “Ricky Wolfe was walking by that first house and I thought, ‘Oh, Wow, this is a nice place with tree-lined streets and sidewalks.’ It was a real neighborhood, and I needed a neighborhood.”

In 2004, she became one of the first five homeowners.

“This was the best thing for me and my family,” she says, curled up in a rocking chair in her living room four years later. “Everything I need is just a hop, skip and a jump away. And I like the diversity here—black, white, high income, low income.”

Hillside had changed since her youth, Squillante admits. But she knew DASH was determined to restore it to a tight-knit community with safe streets.

“The City of LaGrange took this project on just like DASH did and now we have a police presence that makes this area one of the safest in town,” she says, adding that she no longer drives to the local track to walk; her new neighborhood—her old neighborhood restored—has become her track.

“I walk these sidewalks a lot, waving to my neighbors as I go,” she says. “It’s such a great neighborhood. It’s home. I’m back where I need to be.”

For Dana Squillante and her neighbors, DASH for LaGrange put heart back in Hillside.