With just four screens and an unassuming Art Deco marquee, the 24:1 Cinema in Pagedale, Mo., may not seem like much to an outside observer. But to Alderwoman Marla Smith, the one-year-old movie theater’s lights are “eye candy” and a herald of the renaissance she fervently wants for her city.

“When I was a little girl, Pagedale was popping,” says the 44-year-old mother of three. People owned their homes and lived in them, she says. Big employers such as the Lever Brothers soap factory and the Stix, Baer and Fuller department-store warehouse anchored the community.

But by the mid-1980s, many Pagedale businesses were in decline or had shuttered. Unemployment rose, and X-rated movies were showing at the Olympic Drive-in. There hadn’t been a grocery store since the 1960s. Houses went dark when homeowners lost their jobs and mortgages.

In the 1990s, Mayor Mary Louise Carter and the neighborhood development group Beyond Housing began working together to replace dilapidated homes and vacant lots with affordable housing. Then about 10 years ago, they began meeting with residents to ask what else would make their lives better.

“Everybody agreed that a grocery store they could walk to and get fresh fruits and vegetables and get healthy meals was one of the first things they wanted,” Carter says.

Over homemade turkey ribs and peach cobbler, a dozen North St. Louis County mayors and city representatives discuss matters large and small at their monthly gathering: their struggling school district, whether they should jointly bid on computer networking and security services, the cost of road salt.

A mayor’s job isn’t always exciting. But for 24:1’s tiny municipalities, which range from fewer than 200 people to about 5,000, every dollar and efficiency counts. The cities share contracts, best practices, and monthly conversations in the quest to bring better services, health, and well-being to residents. Six of the municipalities now also share a police department, the North County Police Cooperative.

Viola Murphy, mayor of the City of Cool Valley, says 24:1’s collaborative governance started when one of the other mayors asked what she paid for salt. “I told her what we paid and she was like, ‘I pay much more than that,’” she says. “So we started to look at how could we save money for our communities and get things done.”

It’s no exaggeration to say the 24:1 community was shocked to its core four years ago when Missouri stripped its school district of provisional accreditation, citing years of stagnant test scores and poor performance. Alumna Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, now a state-appointed member of the Joint Executive Governing Board that runs the schools, says hearing news of the de-accreditation was “like experiencing death.”

In 2014, the state created a new governing body for the district, the Normandy Schools Collaborative, with a mandate to meet accreditation standards by 2017. The community moved swiftly to action. “It wasn’t just the state that said, ‘Make it right,’” says Superintendent Charles Pearson. “Community members said, ‘Make it right, and we’ll work with you.’”

Normandy’s path forward has not been easy. A state law enabling students to transfer from a de-accredited school to one with accreditation has drained millions of dollars in tuition and transportation fees paid to other, more affluent districts with higher costs. Meanwhile, nearly every Normandy student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch.

For Tina Mosley, owner and director of Our Daycare and Learning Center, caring for children and enriching their lives is a round-the-clock job. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, her preschool caters to parents who juggle two jobs or work and school. Most of the families can’t pay much, if anything, for childcare, but their children get high-quality care nonetheless.

That’s the goal of Programs Achieving Quality, or PAQ, run by the St. Louis nonprofit United 4 Children in the 24:1 footprint: give childcare providers, whether center- or home-based, the resources to create the best learning environment possible for young children. Because Our Daycare and Learning Center and the three-dozen other preschools PAQ works with serve mainly families who receive childcare subsidies, the schools are unable to raise tuition rates, says Director Alleta Kyd. They can’t afford to pay their staff more than $10 to $10.50 an hour, let alone invest in professional development or new playground equipment. Some of the owners are so strapped they can’t even buy toys, Kyd says.