D o r c h e s t e r
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“Two Generations of All Dorchester Sports League,” photo by Mary Schiess, Boston Photography Center.
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If Dorchester were a city, its 92,000 residents would make it the seventh largest in Massachusetts. In fact, it was a separate town for its first 200 years. Founded in 1630, one month before Boston, it has an striking list of American ‘firsts’—among them the first town to support a public school by taxation and the first to hold a town meeting. During the 19th century, Dorchester gradually evolved into a suburb of Boston, linked by the Old Colony Railroad—and was annexed to the city in 1870.
Today, Dorchester is the site of a presidential library and a major campus of the University of Massachusetts—but it really is defined by the remarkable diversity of its people. With a large white population, making up about one-third of its residents—including Irish American families that have lived here for generations—Dorchester is also home to many African Americans and Latinos—and has substantial Vietnamese and Caribbean communities.
This vast neighborhood’s many parts are joined together by Dorchester Avenue, which runs through it like a spine. And it finds much of its cohesiveness through a powerful infrastructure of nonprofit organizations—made even more impressive by their willingness to work together.
One example is Dotwell, a collaborative effort of Codman Square Health Center and Dorchester House Multi-Service Center. Its mission is not only to tackle serious health disparities among Dorchester’s residents, but also to build social capital across Dorchester’s neighborhoods. Another remarkable collaboration is the Fairmount/Indigo Line CDC Collaborative, which brings together four community development corporations from several neighborhoods, including Dorchester Bay, Codman Square, Mattapan, and Southwest Boston. The Collaborative has received national recognition for its smart growth, transit-oriented development plan around the new MBTA commuter rail system.
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