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Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses Hearing 

On Tuesday May 27th, Yari DeJesus, Director of Economic Development at MACDC, and Kim Lyle, CEO of Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation and Chair of MACDC’s Board of Directors, participated in an Informational Hearing held by the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses. They shared pressing challenges facing small business owners in the Commonwealth, including those served by Dorchester Bay, particularly around social, economic, and environmental barriers to growth. They emphasized the importance of increased support for Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), especially in light of potential reductions to the federal CDFI Fund, and called for sustained investments in the small business technical assistance program that help entrepreneurs navigate administrative and financial hurdles. They also highlighted the critical role of microlending in expanding access to capital for underserved entrepreneurs, particularly for small-dollar loans used for working capital, inventory, equipment, or startup costs. The testimony offered both a sobering look at current challenges and practical recommendations to strengthen the Commonwealth’s small business ecosystem. 

Taylor J. Robinson, MPH, PhDc is MACDC’s new Health Equity Intern. Her work supports the planning and implementation of MACDC’s Housing Quality and Health Equity Initiative.  

Taylor is currently a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she studies the intersection of housing, environment, and sleep health through the lens of social epidemiology. As a T32 trainee in Sleep, Circadian, and Respiratory Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, her research interrogates how neighborhood environments, housing conditions, and environmental exposures shape sleep quality in Boston and the wider U.S. population. Her dissertation leverages Fitbit data and indoor temperature measurements to inform community-driven policy solutions.  

Prior to her doctoral training, Taylor earned her MPH in Epidemiology and her BA in Communications and Applied Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh. She has previously worked as a Rappaport Public Policy Fellow at the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities. Her commitment to housing justice and health advancement is also reflected in her work with the NIH, the CDC, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. In her free time, you can find her at a local Boston theatre, in the garden, or attempting a new Southern style recipe!  

MACDC hosted a free webinar for homeowners on how to identify and address lead paint in their homes or rental units they own on Thursday May 1st. The webinar featured speakers from the MA Department of Public Health, local rehabilitation agencies, lenders, and others. The need for this webinar came out of our Community Engagement work in Gateway Cities as part of our Housing Quality and Health Equity Initiative. You can check out the recording of the webinar here. Please feel free to share with your networks! 

Division of Banks Awards More Than $3.5 Million for CDCs and Other Nonprofit Agencies Counseling Homebuyers and Homeowners 

On May 29, 2025, the Healey-Driscoll Administration’s Division of Banks (DOB) awarded more than $3.5 million in grants to 24 nonprofit organizations to fund first-time homeownership education programs and foreclosure prevention counseling centers throughout Massachusetts. These awards- the highest annual awards in the program’s history- were made under the “Chapter 206 Grant Program”- named after the Chapter in the groundbreaking 2007 law enacted in response to the nation’s financial and foreclosure crises.  Despite the current fiscal challenges faced by the Commonwealth, this year’s Chapter 206 awards by the DOB affirmed the importance of these proven counseling agencies which assist homeowners who are experiencing financial hardship and prospective homebuyers who are determining if homeownership is right for them. 

As in prior years, MACDC Members led the way, with 16 collectively receiving more than $2.6 million, three quarters of funding awarded, including awards to the following organizations: 

ACT Lawrence 

Allston Brighton CDC 

Asian CDC 

Codman Square NDC 

Community Development Partnership 

Franklin County Regional Housing and Redevelopment Authority 

Lawrence Community Works 

Neighborhood of Affordable Housing 

NeighborWorks Housing Solutions 

NewVue Communities 

Somerville Community Corporation 

South Middlesex Opportunity Council 

Southeast Asian Coalition of Central MA 

Urban Edge 

Way Finders 

Valley Community Development 

We are grateful to the DOB for its able stewardship and championing of the Chapter 206 Program, and to the Healey-Driscoll Administration and the MA Legislature for their support for the Program. 

From the MACDC GOALs Survey, we know that CDCs provided homebuyer counseling to almost 5,700 households in 2024, and foreclosure prevention counseling to more than 600 households. It’s a powerful combination: sound public investment coupled with a high-capacity nonprofit program delivery system. Since the inception of the Chapter 206 Grant program in 2008, DOB has awarded more than $30 million to organizations that have collectively assisted more than 109,000 consumers. 

MACDC Convenes Forum on Acquisition Strategies, Launches Broader Initiative 

It has been four years since the MACDC Racial Equity Pledge was launched, and we feel that now is a good time to reflect on it and the impact it has had on our partner CDCs across the state. To do this, we met with a few representatives from our partner CDCs to ask them how adopting the Pledge has affected their work.

Franklin County CDC is based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and has been serving the central and western regions of the state since 1979. Their main objectives include providing business development education, access to capital, and commercial office and manufacturing space.

Executive Director John Waite recalls that FCCDC signed onto our pledge “a little over a year ago. We were not one of the first ones, although, I’ve talked to a lot of the CDCs. I go to a lot of the meetings. I think we’ve been working on racial equity, trying to integrate it into our programs, maybe longer than some other CDCs.” FCCDC eventually adopted the pledge to show their solidarity with the other signers.

According to Traci Talbert, FCCDC’s Racial Justice and Community Engagement Leader, their main goal for racial equity work is

to examine everything that we do and ask ourselves, “how are we embedding [racial justice] into our programs and making it a part of everything we do daily?” instead of [having] racial justice as a separate program that we offer as a CDC. We began to examine language. We've examined documents, job postings, [and] looked at what the disruption of white dominant culture actually means. We've been we have our racial justice meetings monthly, and we come together. We read together. We… even feel pain together.

One of the programs being offered by FCCDC is the Racial Justice Reflective Journey. Traci describes it as a series of questions for participants to respond to, then to reflect on their responses. She elaborates by stating that the Journey is

a space for you to just be with yourself and respond to these sessions and… questions in a way that is honest for you, so in the moment, you're able to reflect and say, “Man, I didn't realize that was who I was when I showed up at work,” or “I didn't realize that that's how I behaved,” or “I never thought there was another response to this.”

As of August 2024, around 200 people have participated in in the Journey, and feedback from participants has been good, although some white participants have expressed feelings of discomfort during their self-reflection.

Another program that FCCDC offers is a virtual monthly workshop called Linguistic Bias: What’s the Harm? These sessions focus on identifying and discussing commonly used words and phrases that perpetuate social inequity. However, FCCDC have not limited their focus on minimizing linguistic bias to their monthly workshops. Traci mentioned that FCCDC has also purchased “a software called Textio... We got it one year, and it just was this buzz of helping individuals upload their written documents into the software to help them create a more neutrally toned document.”

John and Traci also said that FCCDC has made a significant adjustment to their hiring practices. Instead of seeking out applicants who would be a good fit to their culture, they are actively looking to add complementary members from all cultural backgrounds. Traci elaborates, “we don't do a ‘perfect fit.’ We're looking to add to our culture, and not looking for culturally fit people.”

Looking ahead, Traci plans to develop a complementary session to FCCDC’s monthly linguistic bias workshop that focuses on “when we judge people based on how they say things. That's something I'm going to be developing because I remember… somebody said they were in a job [interview]… and because of the way they said, “Ask,” they ended up being disqualified from the pool of applicants. FCCDC aspires to continue integrating racial equity into their everyday work and focusing on people who haven't had opportunity to develop wealth as well as those who have been harmed in the past to ensure that they are equitably serving their target communities in Greenfield and western Massachusetts.