Residents who live in Clinton’s District 5 are to be commended for taking their neighborhood back from drug dealers and slum lords and making it a place that people are not only proud of but want to live in.

There’s proof that people, unified and determined, can make a difference in their community in the eyes of those who live in that district. And there are lessons to be learned from their tenacity and their willingness to pull together and work with government officials to make the difference they so desperately wanted.

It started when a group of residents ventured to one of the Clinton City Council’s district meetings a few years back. At that meeting, they talked of the problems they were having and they implored city officials to help them.

Those impassioned pleas were the catalyst for what came next, and what continues to this day in a district once a haven for drug dealers and now a place where children play and adults feel free to sit on their porches enjoying the cool evening air.

From revamping the Sampson Center and adding a new ballfield, to razing dilapidated houses and beefing up a police presence, city officials put action behind their words to residents that that their community would be cleaned up.

It has been, literally and figuratively, with members of the city staff, mayor Lew Starling and District 5 councilwoman and mayor pro tem Maxine Harris joining in a clean-up day to once again show residents that the city was behind them and willing to work alongside them.

The results can be seen all around the district and felt in statistical results that show change for the better.

Police chief Mike Brim said at a recent NAACP town meeting that crime in District 5 has decreased 30 percent in three years and that calls are — 1,000 more calls per year — in that same time period.

And the positive changes haven’t stopped yet. In a Sunday Sampson Independent article about District 5, it was noted that a quarter-mile walking trail is in the works as well as a paved picnic shelter.

It all is something residents can be proud of, particularly knowing that they had a large hand in the positive changes being made in their neighborhoods.

City officials, too, get a big nod of approval for listening to residents’ concerns and acting on them. It goes to show what a grassroots effort can do, particularly when you have a government willing to do more than provide lip service.

In District 5, the end result has been a neighborhood returned to the people who live there and a living, breathing example of the good that can be done when people get actively involved, rather than sitting on the sidelines.