Last week, the Massachusetts Legislature voted to allocate $15 million for the Brownfields Redevelopment Fund in the Commonwealth’s Supplemental Budget.

“The Brownfields Redevelopment Fund is a vital resource for communities across Massachusetts as residents seek to clean up polluted sites in their neighborhoods and transform them into places where people can live, work and play,” commented MACDC’s President Joe Kriesberg. “$15 million is a strong start toward fully recapitalizing the Fund. We look forward to working with the legislature over the coming months to secure additional funding to keep cleaning up the Commonwealth.”

The Brownfields Redevelopment Fund is designed to support the cleanup of vacant or underutilized properties where environmental contamination prevents development or reuse, by providing both interest-free financing for environmental assessments and flexible loans for the environmental cleanup. Since the Fund was created by the Legislature in 1998, it has made 630 individual awards, totaling over $78 million. Over the past five years alone, the Fund supported the creation of 2,551 homes, 2,242 construction jobs, and an additional 2,191 jobs, expected to be created by fund borrowers. The fund was fully depleted in June, 2013.

As of April 2013, MassDevelopment had 26 projects that will receive funding only if the Fund is recapitalized. MACDC and its allies seek a total of $60 million to fully recapitalize the fund, even if it takes more than one year to achieve this level.

A cross-section of leaders convened at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Wednesday, January 15, 2014 to celebrate the Working Cities Challenge, a community development initiative for Massachusetts' smaller cities with a twofold goal:

1. To advance collaborative leadership in Massachusetts' smaller cities;
2. To support ambitious work to improve the lives of low-income people in those cities.

From the 20 applicants, six cities won a total of $1.8 million to support projects that adopted a cross-sector and systems-changing approach to human and economic development. The winning cities were Salem, Somerville, Chelsea, Fitchburg, Lawrence and Holyoke. At the center of five of the six winning applicants were Community Development Corporations, each taking the lead on community engagement within their city's neighborhoods.

"We are pleased to see CDCs participating in these coalitions as we believe this sort of cross-sector, collaborative work represents the future of community development," commented Joe Kriesberg, MACDC's President. "The fact that CDCs are playing a prominent role in five of these cities is not a coincidence, but rather evidence of the vital role that CDCs play in comprehensive community development."

Community development corporations involved in winning Working Cities Challenge Grant teams include: Lawrence Community Works (Lawrence), Twin Cities CDC (Fitchburg), The Neighborhood Developers (Chelsea), North Shore CDC (Salem) and Somerville Community Corporation (Somerville).

The City of Lawrence was awarded $700,000 over three-years for its plan to change the way its school system interfaces with the larger community by focusing on the direct correlation between a family's economic and employment challenges, and student success rates.

"LCW is delighted by this recognition of the positive changes afoot in the City of Lawrence," said Jessica Andors, Executive Director of Lawrence CommunityWorks. "We are excited to work together with the schools, and our outstanding nonprofit and employer partners, to address the direct connection between families' economic challenges and student success. This will be a true team effort and we feel that as a community development corporation, we have a vital role to play in bringing parent voices and institutional partners to the same table."

The City of Fitchburg, along with Twin Cities CDC, was awarded $400,000 over three-years for its eCarenomics Initiative, an effort to develop shared metrics for neighborhood health and well-being with the goal of making the North of Main neighborhood a place where residents can thrive.

Marc Dohnan, Executive Director of Twin Cities CDC remarked, "We are thrilled to be recognized by the Boston Fed. We are fortunate to have a great partner at the City, wonderful leadership from Mayor Wong and lots of hard work and effort from many organizations, but in particular the Montachusett Opportunity Council, which is serving as the backbone agency for the initiative. This could not have happened without the work of so many residents of the North of Main Neighborhoods, who have worked so hard to make their neighborhood a better place to live, work and invest."

Chelsea and The Neighborhood Developers received $225,000 over three-years for their Shurtleff-Bellingham Initiative, designed to engage public, private, and nonprofit sectors in an effort to reduce poverty and mobility rates by 30% in this struggling neighborhood.

The City of Somerville, along with Somerville Community Corporation, was awarded $100,000 in a seed award toward their proposal to reduce unemployment among low-income youth by creating new, youth-targeted workforce development systems infused with mobile technology and social media.

The City of Salem and their lead partner, North Shore CDC, was awarded $100,000 in a seed award for their plan to bring one low-income neighborhood's economic indicators in line with rest of the city by focusing on four issue areas: economic development, small business development, workforce development, and leadership development.

"We are grateful for the support of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Working Cities Challenge Grant funders. This support will enable our team to implement the Point Neighborhood Vision & Action Plan, a community-driven plan poised to bring major economic development and opportunity to Salem," said Mickey Northcutt, CEO of North Shore CDC.

Two teens from Viet-AID's High School Peer Leadership Program will have a very exciting, real-life experience in civic engagement this spring, helping the City of Boston make decisions on how to spend real money.  In creating the last budget of his 20 years in office, Mayor Thomas Menino set aside $1 million for capital projects to be allocated entirely by youths.  The City has signed an agreement with a non-profit organization called the Participatory Budgeting Project to help launch the Youth Participatory Budgeting Process.  According to the City of Boston's statement, starting in January and running to July, youth from all parts of Boston will come together as a steering committee to "identify projects to improve their communities, vet those projects, consider trade-offs, and vote on how to spend the $1 million." Last fall, the City posted an open invitation to all young residents, youth groups and other organizations to apply for membership on the Steering Committee.  Viet-AID was very fortunate to have two members of the Youth Program selected to this committee. As peer leaders of Viet-AID's Leadership Alliance (VALA), Tony Nguyen, a junior year at John D. O'Bryant High School, and Vicky Nguyen (no relation to Tony), a sophomore at the same school will serve as youth representatives on the steering committee. "This is a very exciting opportunity for the young people personally, and for Viet-AID as well," said Carro Hua, who is the Youth Leadership Coordinator and Americorps Massachusetts Promise fellow. "Tony and Vicky will gain a hands-on civic experience along with their other peers as they will also participate in the general participatory budgeting process and as the process unfolds, we will have the opportunity to witness the important impact to our neighborhoods led by young people." As of this writing, the Youth Participatory Budgeting Steering Committee will have had its first meeting, launching this groundbreaking program. When the program concludes later this year, decisions will have been made on a million dollars worth of tangible improvements in the City of Boston.  We at Viet-AID are so pleased to know that our young people will have played a part in developing those plans.

“We applaud President Obama for making income and wealth inequality a central theme in his State of the Union Address. We agree that growing inequality is harming families across this country and threatening the long-term health of our economy, our democracy and our way of life.  Our members are working to help families by engaging them in efforts to improve the neighborhoods and communities where they live and work. We believe that confronting inequality among families requires confronting inequality among places – that means eliminating blight and spurring investment in our lower-income neighborhoods. It means providing safe and affordable homes, helping to start and to grow businesses and expanding local jobs. It means creating safe neighborhoods where parents can raise a family.  We know that local residents and stakeholders are already doing the hard work to build and sustain such neighborhoods.  We need the federal government to be a partner in these efforts and welcome President Obama’s efforts to create and support those partnerships.”

Learn more about what CDCs are doing Massachusetts.

MACDC members,

Here it is!  The first ever NOFA for the Community Investment Tax Credit.

Please note that DHCD will be holding an informational session at our annual meeting in Worcester on Friday, November 15.  If you have not yet registered please do so on our website.

PS - If you are not yet a DHCD-certified CDC you still have time. DHCD has generously given you until December 10 to submit your certification application.

PPS - Don't forget to check out MACDC's CITC resources.

Have you ever tried explaining what your organization does only to sound like you’re listing items on a menu?  “We have this program and that service….”  “Oh, and did I mention we run a loan fund for small businesses and provide supportive housing for the elderly?”  If you’re not careful you can sound like the “Jack of All Trades, Master of None."  If you don’t have a cohesive narrative, anyone listening to you will just become confused and tune out.  The question you need to answer before you respond to any question about what your organization does is – “What is the constant central theme that defines why I’m here?”  Once you can answer that in a sentence, you’re on the road to clear engagement.

Start with the people that you’re directly working with and don’t go too far astray.  For example, you can say, “Our organization was founded by the area’s residents to help lead the community’s revitalization.  We focus on building homes, commercial space and helping the residents with job opportunities and career advancement.”  That sentence might not fit your organization exactly, but I’m not saying “We provide services ranging from x, y and z.”  I start and end my statement with what’s most important to us: How we work with and champion a community and its residents.

Oftentimes, I also like to engage people by talking expressly about why CDCs, for example, are so different from each other.  CDCs should be instruments of redevelopment for each community in which they’re working.  Communities have different needs from each other, or at the very least have different emphasis on similar needs.  While one community may be continuing to address the foreclosure crisis, another community may have large vacant factory spaces.  These two organizations could be working within adjoining communities and still have significant differences in focus.  Use this to stand out a bit and talk about how you’re responding to the needs of your community specifically.

Finally, a cohesive message is only as good as the messenger.  Make sure that ALL staff, ranging from property managers to accountants, know how to present the organization.  It is not good enough if only the executive director or communications director can effectively talk about the organization  

Nonprofits, in general, and CDCs, specifically, can be tough organizations to define and to explain.  A CDC grant writer will tell you that it can seem like well-crafted butchery fitting an organization’s purpose into a 2,000 character text box in an online application.  Take the time to really think about how you can concisely present an accurate description of your organization that doesn’t sound like a list of items on a menu.  Be engaging, direct and to the point.  At the beginning and end it should be about people and how your organization helps make change happen by being a central resource that local people use to transform their community.

To read more about this topic, check out Joe Kriesberg's post "Is there a common theme that unites the CDC sector?"

CDCs are leaders in tearing down walls, literally and figuratively, and creating communities where ALL people can live with dignity while participating in and benefiting from our economy.  This is the ideal vision of what CDCs are striving to achieve.  But most people don’t have the faintest clue who we are or what the acronym CDC means.  The general public’s understanding of a CDC, if they have one at all, most likely is centered on affordable housing.  We, as a field, aren’t very good at telling the public what we do.  Why we do it. What we’re doing and what we’ve done.

Let’s start with acronyms. What is a CDC?  Well, of course, it’s the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.  So are we handling Ebola strains in super-hermitically sealed labs?  No. If you search Google with the term “CDC,” we’re not even a Wiki entry on the first page, or the second, or the third.  The CDC acronym for our field doesn’t work by itself.  This means that you have to KNOW what CDC means in order to begin to get the results in Google relevant to our field.  The problem is worse than this one acronym because we have multiple acronyms just in our names:  NDC, NHS and CED.

Next is the statement “affordable housing” and how it applies to our field.  Do CDCs get involved and lead significant affordable housing projects in their community?  Sure.  But we aren’t affordable housing groups exclusively.  There are many organizations that are producing and preserving affordable housing. The term by itself is inaccurate to describe a CDC. It also can paint an ugly picture in people’s minds about what we do.  Affordable Housing often is associated with big government and gray tenements.  We don’t want to define our field with negative mental associations.  Finally, no one should talk to someone outside of our field or real estate development in general of housing units.  It’s a term that’s cold and used for budgeting and planning purposes.  Leave it there.

Then how do we explain to people what it is that we do effectively, clearly, concisely?  Obviously, this is a hard and complicated question to answer, but we must change the way the general public relates to our work if we want to attract new people to it. I’m not going to answer the question completely in one post, but we can start with the power of a quick defining statement and how it can effectively be used to tell our story a bit more clearly.

MACDC is a big acronym that says what we want to say to elected officials and people involved in our work, but absolutely nothing to anyone else.  It’s why we have adopted a statement that captures what we do without any acronyms and without talking about affordable housing:  “MACDC is an association of mission-driven community development organizations dedicated to creating places of opportunity where ALL people can live with dignity while participating in and benefiting from our Commonwealth's economy.” I can start a conversation off with someone who doesn’t know the field and not get stuck with stereotyping, negative connotations and perplexing acronyms.  This easily leads me into giving examples just about everyone can immediately grasp:  supporting fisherman on the Cape, cleaning up Brownfield sites, creating thousands of new homes across the state and helping families of all backgrounds compete in our economy.  People like hearing about all of this.  AND people relate to what I’m saying immediately.

CDCs are leaders in tearing down walls, except when it comes to sharing with the general public what we do and why. Let’s free ourselves from these language puzzle boxes and get out there and let people know what we do and why.

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I want to hear from you and what your CDC or nonprofit is doing to overcome these communications challenges.  We’re always looking for better ways to express what it is we’re up to as a field.  Post comments here and let’s get the conversation going!

What do Marty Walsh & John Connolly have to say about housing?  Check out their Housing & Community Development Candidate Questionairre responses.

CLICK HERE for John Connolly's responses.

CLICK HERE for Marty Walsh's responses.

Housing is one of the most important issues facing the City of Boston and must be at the top of the new Mayor’s priority list.  Therefore, Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), MA Association of Community Development Corporations , Boston Tenant Coalition, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership , Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance and the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston came together to develop a Mayoral candidate questionnaire on housing and community development issues to better inform the public about how each of the candidates would address these issues.

Questionnaires were mailed and emailed to all candidates on July 15^th, included 15 questions, and allowed candidates to use up to 50 words for each answer.  The completed questionnaires are presented here exactly as they were received. Not all candidates followed the format provided (as can be seen when clicking on the individual PDFs).

As a tax exempt organization our goal with this survey is to educate the public. Publication of these questionnaires should not be construed as an endorsement of any candidate.

CLICK HERE to read the Mayoral Candidate Questionnaire Survey Press Release.

Candidates Charles L Clemons, Jr., Robert Consalvo, and Charles C. Yancey did not respond.

I like stories and I find that the best stories, the ones worth reading again, connect with me on a deeper level.  It’s not the hero’s adventure or the amazing experiences the protagonist has going up against their antagonist that catches and holds my attention as much as it is the emotional link that is created somehow between the story and me.  Because we live in a world of commercials and crass advertisements of every kind, it’s hard not to be bitter, cynical and downright irritated at our blatantly overexposed, oversold world.  It’s almost impossible for me to become connected to anything in any commercial.  But on occasion, something will catch my attention and linger with me just a little bit.  This is true with Apple’s recent iPhone commercials where they move away from the tech and just show how their product has changed our lives.  I think that CDC staff engaged in prospecting for new donors through the CITC program can learn from this marketing approach because we can easily get caught up talking about housing units and how we run one program or another, when what really matters, what really catches people’s attention are the people that we work with and help out through our efforts each and every day.

In order to understand a little bit more about what I’m talking about, check out the Apple commercials on their website.  The story here is about music and our lives in one commercial and photographs in another.  We are connecting to our world and sharing it with others in ways that simply didn’t exist six years ago when the iPhone first debuted.  Apple knows how profoundly they’ve changed our world and they’re able to capture that in video collages or thumbnails sketches that glimpse at how significant these changes are to our lives.  But our work in helping transform our communities isn’t any different.  When we build a home or a new store front, when we prevent a family from losing their home through foreclosure, when we work with a small business and help them finance a new location or expand online, we’re helping change the way people live, grow, share and support each other.  This is the message that Apple captures in their commercials, and we shouldn’t shy away from sharing our own stories with the world.

I can hear many of you pushing back that we can’t afford to capture our work this way.  Apple has tons of money to spend on marketing and we don’t.  This is true.  But the stories aren’t any different.  Find the time to collect the stories and the experiences behind your work and learn about the many ways you can share them with people.  Thanks to smartphones, we can capture events and without too much editing publish them to YouTube and then release a notice to the world through Twitter.  Will your end product look as polished as Apple’s?  No, but it doesn’t need to be.  Our stories, told compellingly, will engage very well without a multimillion dollar marketing budget.

We owe it to ourselves and our organizations to take the time to learn how to share with others what it is we do and why.  As we reach out to new donors, we’re going up against other worthy nonprofits with great missions.  We must learn how to connect with people not simply because we do lots of great stuff, but because at the end of the day, we are helping revitalize communities one individual and family at a time.

Boston is widely known across the country for having one of the strongest CDC networks in the United States.  One reason for our success has been the close partnership between the CDCs and City Hall during the tenure of Mayor Thomas Menino and his predecessor, Mayor Ray Flynn.  Both Mayors have worked with CDCs as partners and the results speak for themselves. In particuar, under Mayor Menino’s Leading the Way Initiative, CDCs and the CIty of Boston have successfully built and preserved thousands of homes and created thousands of jobs.  Can you imagine what Boston neighborhoods would be like today if the Mayor and the CDCs were in conflict and competition, instead of collaboration? Personally,  I’d rather not think about that!

With the campaign to succeed Mayor Menino now fully underway, the MACDC Boston Committee has developed a 10 point Community Development Agenda that we are releasing as part of our effort to ensure that this extradorinary record of achievement and collaboration continues regardless of which candidate emerges as the winner.  We recommend the following:

1. Enact a strong Inclusionary Development Ordinance:  Such an ordinance should (a) require that a minimum of 15% of the units in new market-rate developments be affordable, (b) establish “pay-out” fees sufficient to produce a comparable number of off-site units, (c) ensure greater transparency at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, (d) ensure neighborhood equity, and (e) empower DND to administer IDP dollars along with other housing funds.
2. Strengthen the City’s Linkage program:  This requires increasing the linkage payments for housing and workforce development and allowing linkage funds to be used for a broader array of community economic development and small business development programming.
3. Continue Leading the Way: The City of Boston must continue to “Lead the Way” on affordable housing by establishing ambitious, measurable multi-year goals for housing and by growing the City’s annual Leading the Way appropriation from $5 million to $10 million per year.
4. Leverage public land disposition: The City should establish land disposition policies that require or at least favor affordable housing development and price such land to enable developers to build homes that are affordable to Boston residents. The City should also prioritize selling properties to community based non-profits that propose development plans consistent with neighborhood priorities. The City should also exercise leadership to ensure that state-owned parcels are developed with similar guidelines and priorities.
5. Support neighborhood economic development: The City should fund a robust and city-wide small business development support system that leverages the capacity, expertise, and physical presence of CDCs and other community based organizations across the City. Such a program should provide training, technical assistance and financing to existing and aspiring entrepreneurs and should be designed to leverage private, federal and state dollars.
6. Promote Mixed Use and Transit Oriented Development: The City should partner with CDCs and other private developers to support mixed use developments, especially those near transit nodes, which help create the lively, vibrant urban neighborhoods that Boston resident’s desire. This means strategically leveraging housing dollars, CDBG funds, public land, and zoning tools to make it easier and less expensive to bring those projects to completion.
7. Enact the Community Preservation Act: The new Mayor should lead a campaign to win ballot approval of the Community Preservation Act to provide new funding for affordable housing development, historic preservation and green space. The CPA would establish a 1% property tax surcharge and leverage millions of dollars in state matching funds.
8. Partner with community based organizations: The City should leverage the assets and capacity of local community based organizations, CDCs and others, to implement housing, economic development, workforce development and other city priorities.
9. Ensure the Casino benefits Boston residents: If Boston becomes home to a new casino, the new Mayor must ensure that Boston residents are able to access jobs during both construction and operation of the facility. Local, minority and women owned businesses must have access to contracting opportunities and community mitigation funds must be provided to impacted neighborhoods.
10. Advocate for state and federal resources: The next Mayor of Boston must be a leader at the State House and with our Congressional delegation to make sure Boston has access to state and federal dollars for housing, economic development, brownfields recapitalization and many other programs.