Letter from the President and CEO and Board Chair - Annual Report 2010
Dear Friend,
As we began to reflect on the past year in preparing this annual report we saw two competing story lines. The on-going economic crisis continued to wreck havoc on the communities and families we serve and in many cases on the financial health of MACDC member organizations. Foreclosures continue unabated, small businesses are having a difficult time finding credit and customers, and the state’s housing development pipeline has become so long that many of our members are struggling to advance community priorities.
Yet MACDC and its members have had an incredibly successful year in winning important new public policies, launching and building new collaborative programs, and sustaining ourselves in such a way that we will be able to continue our important work for years to come.
Since the economic tales of woe are well known to all, this letter focuses on the good news!
During FY 2010, MACDC achieved the following:
- Our Campaign for Our Neighborhoods was successful in winning several important state policy victories, including a Housing Preservation Law, a new anti-foreclosure law, the creation of a new Growth Capital Corporation to support local businesses, and a major reform to the 35-year-old CDC enabling statute that will help support the growth of the CDC field.
- Following the launch of the Mel King Institute for Community Building in May 2009, we completed an outstanding first year with 243 people participating in 26 days of training covering a variety of community development issues.
- The Community Development Innovation Forum published important new research on CDC fiscal health and CDC collaborations, while hosting several public events and advancing new initiatives related to comprehensive community development, CDC collaboration, CDC fiscal strength, and field building.
- Our member engagement and participation continued to grow as we held 11 district meetings with legislators, had over 200 people attend our annual Lobby Day, and had 120 participants in our peer groups.
- Our members continued to produce remarkable results despite the economy as documented in our 2010 GOALs Report, with our members’ total economic impact reaching $308 million in 2009.
- We completed a new Strategic Plan and finished the year with a budget surplus for the 15th year in a row.
You can learn more about all of these efforts and others in this annual report. Please take a few moments to review these pages, follow the links and offer your comments so this report can serve not only as our report to you, but your opportunity to give us feedback on our work.
Today’s economic crisis underscores the importance of helping local residents and business owners work together to identify, advance and steward positive community improvement – especially for those communities and families most severely impacted by the crisis. But this work is not simply crisis management. The challenges we face are deeper and more systemic than today’s stock report or unemployment rate. This work is generational. Community improvement must be won, sustained and won again and again. We need advocates, implementers and stewards. And for this, we need locally accountable, community based organizations that can deliver real results.
In short, we need CDCs.
And so, MACDC’s new strategic plan reaffirms our commitment to, in the words of our new mission statement, helping CDCs to “work together and with others to create places of opportunity where people of diverse incomes and backgrounds access housing that is affordable, benefit from economic opportunities and fully participate in the civic life of their community.”
We thank all of our supporters who are helping us to achieve this vision.
Sincerely,
| Charles H. Rucks, Esq Chair |
Joseph Kriesberg President & CEO |
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