The newly launched Rosemont Community Civic Association spent Saturday delivering Thanksgiving dinners – turkeys, dressing and all the trimmings — to five local families.

“Charity starts at home,” said the organization’s president, Quinton Franklin, hauling a frozen bird and bag of groceries from his car up to a Spruce Street home. “We are investing back into our community … and looking out for one another. We want to build our city by building our community.”

The Rosemont Community Civic Association represents the neighborhood from South Division to South 12th streets, including the October at Fair Downs subdivision off East Washington Street.

For decades, the community had the Rosemont/Lloyd Place Civic League, which tackled important issues of the era, Franklin said. The civic league was vital to registering Suffolk’s black citizens to vote in the 1960s and helping bring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Suffolk in June 1963, two months before his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.

But over the years, the civic league’s members aged and few — if any — young people joined its ranks, Franklin said. In 2010, after longtime president T.C. Williams died at 90, the civic league fizzled out.

Before he died, Williams talked to Franklin, now 28, about the importance of the civic league and urged him to get involved.

“He lit a fire in me,” Franklin said. The new civic association was born over the summer, when Franklin and a couple of neighbors began talking about community concerns.

“We realized that three guys can’t tackle these issues all by ourselves and provide the help this community needs,” Franklin said. “We had to organize and get the community involved if we wanted change.”

Since their debut meeting in October, the Rosemont Community Civic Association has grown to 15 members, Franklin said. Although most are middle-aged or older, Franklin hopes to woo more 20- and 30-somethings into the organization.

“The younger generation needs to get involved,” he said. “While we want to pull from original members and the older generation, we (in my generation) are the future.

“We are at the age to do something that will positively impact our community and our city.”

It’s important for young people to become involved, added Wright, 65, the civic association’s vice president.

“Younger folks have no interest in things like this right now,” he said. “But people my age … and Mr. Franklin’s age are not going to be here forever. They need to get involved now, learn how to do things and who to go to to get things done.”

Some of the community’s issues are the same ones that Williams tackled in his later years on behalf of the Rosemont/Lloyd Place Civic League, Franklin said. From his perspective, the top issues include getting curbs and gutters throughout the community, addressing speeding issues and taking care of the dilapidated Rosemont Cemetery, a historic graveyard where black veterans and civic leaders are buried.

“One of our goals is to get rid of ditches throughout the neighborhood,” Franklin said. Regardless of who technically owns the cemetery, the association wants to clean it up and take steps to preserve the graves.

“The people buried there paved the way for us years ago,” he said. “Now we need to honor their history by getting that cemetery up to par.”

The association also wants to see power and utility lines buried, aligning Rosemont with Main Street and the upper part of East Washington Street, and to get better lighting along streets, Wright said.

But for now, the organization is focused on growing membership and providing Christmas dinners to five families in the Rosemont neighborhood, Franklin said. Dues are $5 per month for each household.

Anyone wanting membership information or to donate to the Christmas food campaign can reach Franklin via email, rosemontassociation@gmail.com, or phone, 935-7186. Food donations can also be dropped off at the Style Shop, 177 E. Washington St.