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!

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.

As a fundraiser, I want to tell my story as clearly and concisely as possible. This can be quite challenging, particularly because CDCs are diverse organizations with a number of programs addressing numerous causes in their community. One tool that I've used for years is maps, and with new data sources, the power of maps keeps growing.

Maps help remove many of the storytelling barriers by showing complex data almost instantly.  Where are the homes you’ve built located?  What are the busy transportation corridors in your service area?  Where are there gaps in critical services, such as poor access to supermarkets, pharmacies and job hubs?  Plot this information out quickly to tell your story concisely and compellingly by sharing your successes and opportunities for future projects and programs.  For a place-based organization, like a CDC, it’s a powerful tool to know how to use.

I recently attended a presentation at the Boston Foundation by Professor Sarah Williams of MIT.  Her project, “Million Dollar Blocks”, is on display in New York’s MOMA.  In this project, she mapped out the addresses of New York residents who are incarcerated.  Those areas with phenomenally high rates of incarceration are called Million Dollar Blocks (CLICK HERE to see one of her maps). (Check out more work by Professor Williams and her colleagues) This is a map that tells a story and conveys an enormous amount of information in seconds.  For civil rights advocates and professionals in Community Economic Development this isn’t necessarily revolutionary information.  However, by presenting it in such a convincingly clear and concise manner, it tells a powerful story in seconds. If you’re a nonprofit looking to reduce incarceration rates, strengthen community engagement and organizing efforts, create opportunities for advancement and raise funds toward these causes, this could be a very compelling part of your presentation. 

Many of us can’t afford GIS mapping tools, but take the time to learn about some of the resources that are available online for free.  Google Fusion Tables are worth learning more about.  You can upload a spreadsheet with data points, property listings etc. that are geo-located in minutes.  The Commonwealth offers numerous data sets through their Oliver system for free.  Also, MAPC has the DataCommon project.  The Boston Foundation with MAPC runs the Indicators Project, which looks to be expanding some of its services for the entire state in the near future. Of course, Census.gov has resources, such as the FactFinder.  Classes are offered frequently for Census resources, some of which are through the Mel King Institute, and MAPC’s DataCommon.

It only makes sense for CDCs as place-based organizations to use maps to advance how they share their projects, programs and, of course, performance to mission.  With free online resources to get you started, learning how to use these tools is well worth the time commitment.

“Let’s invest in what works,” is a common and recurring slogan that has gained currency in recent years and why shouldn’t it? Who is going to advocate that we invest in what’s broken? So I was not surprised to see a new book built around this idea called “Investing in What Works for America’s Communities,” co-edited by Nancy Andrews, President of the Low Income Investment Fund and David Erickson from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  The book urges us to “break through silos in our programs, our financing streams and our thinking” and to use “data-based rigorous analysis to direct scarce resources to what works.”  This is an important book with contributions from leading thinkers in our field so serious community development practitioners and students would be well advised to read it.

That is not to say that I liked or agreed with all that I read. Many of the articles were interesting, insightful, thought provoking and even inspiring. I found myself reacting with enthusiasm to many of the ideas in the book. And Ellen Seidman writes a wonderful summary of the many ideas presented that is worth reading even if you don’t have time for the entire book. As a whole, I think the book offers an important contribution to the on-going discussion about the future of community development in America, but I also think it exemplifies some of the trends in our field that make me very nervous.  So let me share with you some of what I think works about “What Works,” and what I think does not work.

What works about “Investing in What Works for America’s Communities:”

• • I agree with the general theme throughout the book that we need to take a comprehensive approach to community development. Virtually every article hit on this theme and it is consistent with the direction we are pursuing here in Massachusetts.
• • I was also pleased to read articles by a few of authors that emphasize the importance of engaging local residents and working at the neighborhood level.
• • It was gratifying to see a strong recognition of the importance of neighborhoods and neighborhood level work, in addition to the now common calls for regional solutions. We need to work at both levels and I think the book makes that point effectively. Thankfully, the pendulum is slowly swinging back to the center on the perpetual debate between regional and neighborhood level work.
• • The book includes interesting and thoughtful articles about a range of issues from health care, to housing, to education, to transit oriented development, to crime, to economic development and how these issues intersect with each other– there are good lessons and good ideas throughout.
• • Thankfully, the book avoids the tired old debate about place-based strategies and people-based strategies and endorses both approaches.
• • And the book includes one of the best histories of community development that I have read in a long time in a chapter by Alexander von Hoffman that traces the field’s history without focusing entirely on federal policy as many do.

What does not work about “Investing in What Works for America’s Communities:”

• • Amazingly, this 419 page book about the future of community development, a book with 30 authors, does not include a single page written by someone from Community Development Corporation. There are articles by academics, government officials, foundation executives, national non-profits, CDFIs and more, but not one by a CDC practitioner.  Now I would certainly not argue that CDCs should be the only voice in such a book, but how can that perspective be entirely excluded?  The national conversation about the future of our field must include a more diverse set of voices – we can’t allow it to become a small echo chamber.
• • Much of the book is focused on community development finance, an important topic to be sure. But it reinforced my growing concern about the sector is becoming too “finance-centric” just as we begin to move away from a “real-estate centric” vision of community development. Many of us have bemoaned the fact that our economy is increasingly dominated by the finance industry, but now we see the community development field is increasingly organized around finance.
• • While I am a strong proponent of comprehensive community development, I think this book might be taking the concept too far. Community development can’t be everything for everybody. The term loses meaning if we use it to describe every activity and program that benefits low income people or neighborhoods. Moreover, as the Aspen Institute has pointed out, too much comprehensiveness can be a problem too, as initiatives collapse under the weight and complexity of trying to connect every dot and solve every problem.
• • Similarly, the core premise of the book seems to be that the goal of community development is to dramatically reduce poverty in America. I don’t think that was or is the goal of community development, and certainly not the defining goal.  I certainly agree that community development needs to be part of the solution, but it can’t do it alone. If we expect community development to solve poverty than we are setting ourselves up to fail – even if we are successful at the more limited (yet still important) goals we can actually achieve like improving the quality of life for local residents, providing some economic stability  for low income families, and increasing community control over community assets and local development.
• • I also worry about the hyper-focus on outcomes and data. Now how can anyone speak out against achieving outcomes and measuring them with data? It’s impossible, right? And certainly, I think we should measure outcomes with data. But there are risks with data that were not sufficiently addressed in this book. Sometimes data can mislead. Sometimes, data can be flawed. Sometimes, data miss important elements. For example, poverty data does not account for housing subsidies, food subsidies, child care subsidies or health care subsidies, so providing those forms of assistance do not reduce poverty, at least as measured by our government. But do they help people make ends meet? Do they help people gain economic stability? Of course they do.  And a focus on population level outcomes can quickly create incentives to displace low income people and exclude them from the population being studied. Data is a tool that can be used wisely or poorly. Let’s use some wisdom along with our data.
• • Finally, the book fails to sufficiently talk about the vital role that advocacy and organizing play in shaping public policy at the local, state and national level. Any serious attempt to reduce income inequality and poverty in America has to include changes in policy. I believe that the community development movement has to be part of shaping that new policy framework.

“Investing in What Works for America’s Communities” makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate and discussion about the future of the community development field.  But we need more voices and more skeptical voices to join the fray.  At a minimum, I hope the next edition includes a few articles from those working on the front lines in America’s neighborhoods. I suspect they will have something interesting to contribute.

MACDC is pleased to share this blog from Standford Fraser who is interning at NACEDA for the Spring 2012 Semester. He is currently a Junior History major and Community Development minor at Howard University.

Benefit Corporations are defined as a new class of corporation that 1) creates a material positive impact on society and the environment; 2) expands corporate fiduciary duty to require consideration of non-financial interests when making decisions; and 3) reports on its overall social and environmental performance using recognized third party standards. 

In April 2010, Maryland became the first state to pass legislation that legally recognizes benefit corporations (B corps). Today seven states recognize benefit corporations: California, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland and Hawaii with legislation pending in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan. B corps are still unknown to a large number of community developers. The simplest way to describe them is that they exist somewhere between non-profits and traditional corporations, leaning closer to traditional corporations in their operations. An example of a B corp would be Atayne which transforms trash into athletic wear or App-X that specializes in web based Alternative Asset Fund Managing for non-profit organizations. As part of their mission of being a B corporation, App-X even distributes some of their online products for free. To become a Certified B corp an organization is evaluated through the 'B Impact Assessment' that provides a 'B Impact Report' taking into consideration a company's governance, workers rights, as well as environmental and community impact.  

 In a January 2012 article of The Economist, B corp proponents cite their financial flexibility as a critical asset, , "Non-profit firms and charities are needlessly restricted in their ability to raise capital when they need to grow." Benefit corporations do create profits. This allows them to act economically independent from government programs and grants.  

However, b-corps have skeptics. They claim the line between b-corps and traditional for-profit corporations is too thin. Other opponents believe the standards for evaluating benefit corporations are not clearly defined. Despite these criticisms, it seems that benefit corporations are growing in popularity and purpose. As their popularity and numbers increase, we must ask ourselves, 'What potential relationship can these businesses have with community development work?'  

One issue that is a constant worry for non-profits and community development corporations are finances. It appears as though traditional public sources of funding for CDCs are becoming increasingly scarce. CDCs must begin to look for new and innovative funding mechanisms. Formal partnerships between benefit corporations and community development corporations may have mutual benefit. One question that came into my mind, 'Can the mission of a benefit corporation help fund non profits? If so, how? If not, why not?  

In certain states, it may even be possible for a benefit corporation to actively involve themselves in community development work. There is potential for local businesses, B corps, and CDCs to create strong bonds actively shaping their local community. As a for profit entity, Benefit Corporations may have the ability to accomplish more than traditional non profits. They are not strapped to traditional nonprofit funding streams. Benefit corporations are a relatively new phenomenon in America. A lot remains to be discovered. What is clear, is that benefit corporations and their formation demonstrate a conscious effort to positively contribute to the world community. As community developers, we must stay abreast of B corps and other movements to positively change communities. Hopefully, this blog post is first of several conversations about benefit corporations and their role in community development.  

To learn more about benefit corporations, please review these links below: 

http://www.bcorporation.net/publicpolicy 

http://www.thenation.com/article/161261/rise-benefit-corporations 

http://www.economist.com/node/21542432 

Consider:

• The Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, RI achieves a 53% reduction in crime.
• The Druid Hills Neighborhood of Charlotte, NC achieves a 58% reduction in crime.
• The Phillips Neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN achieves a 90% reduction in drug-related crime

What do these three neighborhoods have in common that enabled them to achieve and sustain such extraordinary reductions in crime? Each has had an intentional, pro-active partnership between the local CDC and the local police department. And according to a new book that highlights these and other success stories from around the country, such results could be achieved throughout the country if more CDCs and more police departments would join together.

Building Our Way Out of Crime: The Transformative Power of Police-Community Developer Partnerships, by Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky, is one of the most exciting books to come along in some time as it demonstrates with hard data and compelling stories the amazing results that have been and can be achieved.  Geller and Belsky have worked for decades to foster such partnerships largely as part of LISC’s Community Safety Initiative (which is now run by Julia Ryan, a former MACDC staff person.)

By working together, CDCs and the police can deploy their respective tools and assets in a coordinated way to attack high crime areas. According to the forward written by Paul Grogan and Bill Bratton, “these collaborations work – they reduce crime; replace problem properties with quality, affordable housing; attract viable businesses in previously blighted commercial corridors; make more strategic and efficient use of public and private sector resources; and build public confidence in and cooperation with local government and private organizations.”  

How does this happen? Police help CDCs prioritize development opportunities and design new developments in ways that make it easier to prevent crime (e.g. “put eyes on the street.”) CDCs eliminate blighted properties that consume a disproportionate share of police resources. Together, the police and the CDCs advocate for public and private investment that neither could attract on their own. The key, according to Geller and Belsky is to make the relationship intentional and long term. It is not enough for CDCs and police to function in parallel – they must work together and they must stick together for the long haul.

The report also helps to disprove the notion that locating new affordable housing in lower income communities will somehow make those neighborhoods worse. Indeed, what this book demonstrates is that carefully planned and designed affordable housing can not only improve the economic well being of its residents, but the overall quality of life for everyone in the community. Such a strategy will ultimately benefit many more people than simply trying to help a few lucky residents move to higher income and lower crime communities.  We need to fight crime in these neighborhoods – not give in to it.

Many CDCs in Massachusetts have also seen the power of such partnerships, so much so that officers from the Boston Police Department recently testified at the State House in support of the Community Development Partnership Act.  Boston LISC is supporting these efforts through its Resilient Communities/Resilient Families program.

What this book shows is that those efforts can and must be expanded because Geller and Belsky have shown us that we can indeed build our way out of crime.

Starting in the mid 1970s, Mel King and other visionary leaders of the community development movement worked systematically to build a support infrastructure for CDCs in Massachusetts. They understood that such a system could grow what was then a nascent movement of community based development organizations, largely in Boston, and transform it into a robust, statewide field that could achieve impact at scale. So they created CEDAC, CDFC, the CDC Enabling Act, Chapter 40F, the CEED program, LISC and ultimately, in 1982, the Massachusetts Association of CDCs. These institutions laid the foundation for what quickly became one of the strongest community development sectors in the country and left a legacy from which we continue to benefit today – 30 years later.

The past few years have seen a similar wave of system building for the community development field. Starting with, and emerging from, the Community Development Innovation Forum that MACDC launched with LISC in 2008, we have seen the creation of the Mel King Institute for Community Building, the transformation of CDFC into the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation, and the modernization of the 1977 CDC enabling law into Chapter 40H, which creates, for the first time, a formal CDC certification process. We have also seen a wave of efforts to lift CDC practice in areas as diverse as community engagement (LISC’s Resilient Communities/Resilient Families program), financial management (MHP’s efforts to promote Strength Matters) and asset management, real estate development and small business development (through programs at the King Institute.)  And we have formed new cross-sector partnerships between the community development movement and sister movements in transit equity, smart growth, public health, and energy, enabling us to move toward more comprehensive and systemic change.

These efforts have the potential to culminate in 2012 with the passage of the Community Development Partnership Act. This ground breaking and game changing legislation would leverage up to $12 million in new, private philanthropy for high impact community development efforts. The program is “community centric” rather than “real estate centric,” opening the door for CDCs to pursue broad, comprehensive community development strategies. The legislation has garnered widespread support both inside and outside the State House, with House Speaker Robert DeLeo recently indicating serious interest in moving the legislation forward. If we can pass the CDPA this year, in 2012, it will allow us to build on all the great work of the past three years and the past thirty-plus years and take it to a level of scale and impact we have never seen. And by passing it this year, we can ensure the program is implemented by the Patrick Administration and its outstanding new Undersecretary for Housing and Community Development, long-time friend Aaron Gornstein.

While the economy continues to struggle and our communities fight to recover from the recession, we have a chance to do something big, bold, meaningful and lasting by passing the Community Development Partnership Act.

And when we come together this fall to officially celebrate MACDC’s 30^th Anniversary we will not only be able to celebrate our field’s extraordinary history, but also its exciting and bright future.

I greatly enjoyed Russ Douthat’s column in last week’s Sunday New York Times called “Our Reckless Meritocracy."  Reflecting on former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s fall from grace, Douthat notes that many super smart and super successful leaders in business and politics have “led us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for [their] own good.” Douthat continues,
“In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture. In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world.”
While Douthat’s article focuses on the impact of this pattern in business and politics, I wonder if the nonprofit sector might face similar risks. I'm skeptical that simply being smarter by using "evidence based models," and "data driven programs" and "business metrics" and "triple bottom line investments" will suddenly transform persistent social challenges that have plaqued human society for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  Proposals like Social Impact Bonds, which presume an ability to measure social impact with such precision that we can create meaningful investment vehicles based on that data, strike me as an example of becoming “infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world.” In the community development world, financial innovation has generated more and more complicated financial tools that may add more complexity than value, and also make it harder for local residents and non-professionals to fully enage in the community development process. 

I am certainly not saying that innovation, evaluation, evidence and data are not important. I am not a climate change denier or someone who rejects science, expertise and knowledge.  The nonprofit sector absolutely needs to make better use of emerging tools. We should absolutely strive to learn more about the cause and cure of social ills and apply that knowledge diligently.  I have no doubt that we can do a better job than we have in the past at fighting social challenges and problems. But I also agree with Douthat’s conclusion:
“In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.”

While the Tea Party’s manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling sucks up all the oxygen in Washington, the White House quietly released an important new report in July entitled Building Neighborhoods of Opportunity that outlines best practices in neighborhood revitalization around the country.  The report highlights the work of CDCs, community based groups, schools and local governments and discusses how the federal government could more effectively support such efforts.

When I sat down to read it, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they identify five key elements to successful neighborhood improvement – and I agree with all of them (I don’t always agree with the White House these days!) Specifically, the White House report highlights these five things: 

1. Resident engagement and community leadership catalyzes and sustains comprehensive change efforts;
2. Developing strategic and accountable partnerships leads to lasting change;
3. Maintaining a results focus supported by data presents a strategy for achieving specific objectives, helps to focus multiple stakeholders on a common goal, and can lead to a common dataset to measure progress;
4. Investing in and building organizational capacity helps organizations meet their objectives; and
5. Aligning resources to a unified and target impact strategy builds a critical mass of efforts in a neighborhood to reduce neighborhood distress.

We can see each these elements in action today in the work that community developers are doing in Boston and around the country.

I was particularly pleased to see items #1 and #4, as much of the current momentum in our field is moving away from these two concepts.  I worry that the drive toward regionalism, centralization, consolidation and organizational scale that permeates much of the national dialogue will inexorably weaken opportunities for meaningful resident engagement and community leadership - what I and others call “demand driven community development.”  Don’t get me wrong – scale and efficiency are good things. But, I am glad that the White House report is reminding us about the importance of community engagement. I hope it will inspire policymakers, funders and practitioners to think about how we can create a system that is both more efficient and more genuinely community based.

The White House is also correct to underscore the importance of building the capacity of organizations to initiate, implement and sustain community improvement.  I hope this serves to push back against what I perceive as a growing “capacity building fatigue” among some funders and policy makers who prefer to work only (or mainly) with well established (and usually large) groups that already have substantial capacity.  Capacity building, like education, needs to be a permanent feature of a well organized, high performing and adaptive community development system.

While there was much to like in the report, it does not offer a strategy for supporting resident engagement and capacity building in a systemic way that gets us to serious scale. Most of the highlighted programs are models and pilots serving a few dozen neighborhoods. But the question that the White House and all of us need to ask is how we support this work in hundreds or even thousands of neighborhoods.  For that, we need sustainable business models that support long term capacity building and resident engagement at the local level.  MACDC’s proposed Community Development Partnership Act is a key part of our answer to that question.  And we also need to make community development programs and projects profitable for community based non profits so they can earn the flexible funds they need to build and sustain their own capacity over time.  Adjustments in federal rules and guidelines could help with that objective.  

The White House report lays out some exciting ideas for generating sustainable economic development at the neighborhood level - something our country desperately needs. Let’s hope that the debt ceiling deal does not kill these efforts before they have a chance to bear fruit.

The Community Development Innovation Forum has helped to spur numerous efforts to expand and deepen collaboration with the goal of improving effectiveness and efficiency in the sector. With the help of new funding from Citi and Bank of America, MACDC is now leading a major planning effort to explore the efficacy and viability of a statewide partnership among CDCs and others who provide technical assistance to local entrepreneurs.

For years, MACDC members have helped entrepreneurs start, grow and sustain small businesses that provide jobs and opportunity for local communities. In 2010, our members served over 2,000 entrepreneurs develop business plans, find new locations and markets, access financing and deal with the slumping economy. CDCs have frequently partnered in these efforts with each other and with other organizations such as Small Business Development Centers, local governments, banks, and CDFIs (many of our members are CDFIs themselves.) Perhaps the most sustained and deepest of these partnerships has been the Community Business Network in Boston through which several CDCs have worked together since the mid 1990s.

Earlier this year, MACDC received funding from Citi and Bank of America to explore the potential for a statewide partnership that builds and expands on these earlier efforts. We formed a planning committee comprised of practitioners, public officials, bankers and scholars to guide our planning effort and hired two experienced consultants, Leslie Belay and Jason Friedman, to conduct research, planning and program design work.  Jason is examining best practices around the country and Leslie is conducting interviews and focus groups with stakeholders here in Massachusetts. At a recent meeting with the SBA and their partners, national SBA Administrator Karen Mills joined the meeting and voiced her strong support of the effort and specifically encouraged SBA partners like the SBDCs to partner with CDCs and vice versa.

The planning efforts has already identified several areas where collaboration could yield significant benefits. These could include: shared information technology and outcome measurement systems; shared protocols for intake, assessment and business plan assistance, shared expertise in specific sectors or areas of support (e.g. food industry, or green technologies); shared market research that would provide local businesses with access to better market data; joint partnerships with other organizations, professional development and training for practitioners, joint fundraising, and special projects.

We expect the planning process to proceed through the summer with the hopes of making a determination by early Fall as to whether such a Partnership makes sense. If we decide to move ahead, the next stage will include fundraising, recruitment of the initial class of members, and refinement of the program design, structure and services.

If you are interested in learning more or getting involved, please contact me.