Issues and Angles from Inaugural Meetings
By Patrick Barry with photos by Gordon Walek
Published: April 27, 2010
When the Institute gathered for the first meeting of its Board of Advisors followed by a day-long inaugural, the discussions and speeches made clear the complexity and importance of comprehensive development. Speakers identified challenges and ambiguities in the work they do every day, and posed questions that will have to be answered in the years ahead.
Listen in and offer your own viewpoints in the comments section. Or watch the full video record.
Board of Advisors meeting, April 19, 2010
Bob Weissbourd, RW Ventures LLC:
“There’s a tension in the field between where we are versus where we aspire to be, and I think we need to be more honest about that. Like any other institution we get a little caught up in protecting our turf. I think one role we could play is to help the field develop the capacity to continuously improve what we do.”
Paul Brophy, Brophy & Reilly LLC
"We’re in a good spot. We elected a community organizer from Chicago to the White House. That’s a good first step. I think the work that the Institute does could go a long way toward helping the administration evolve its thinking.”
Anne Kubisch, Director, Roundtable on Community Change, Aspen Institute:
“The summary conclusion is that these comprehensive community initiatives had some successes but they did not achieve the ambitions that were set out for them. The ambition was that they would transform neighborhoods, and they did not transform neighborhoods. So the question is, what can we learn from the last 20 years about what has worked well and what hasn't?”
Inaugural Opening Sessions, Capital Hilton, April 20, 2010
Michael Rubinger, President, Local Initiatives Support Corporation:
"There have been many attempts over the years to achieve comprehensive development, some successful, others not. . . . So what we will try to do at the Institute is learn from both the successes and failures, ours at LISC and others as well. The goal is to aggregate the best information, disseminate the best practices, and hopefully influence the course of research and policy for the field."
Andrew Mooney, Managing Director, Institute for Comprehensive Community Development:
"Provocative is the word that I hope will be associated with the Institute as we inaugurate it today. We hope that the Institute will add to the discussion, providing a new table at which practitioners and theorists, community leaders and policy makers, program developers and funders, can seek new understandings of what works, and what doesn't, and why."
Julia Stasch, Vice President of the Program on Human and Community Development, MacArthur Foundation:
"I would like to see the Institute at the intersection of two very important conversations . . . the metropolitan conversation . . . and the community or neighborhood conversation. Each acknowledges the other, but I fear that in both it may be just lip service, and that neither actually knows what it will take for the metropolitan conversation to value the contribution that vital, functioning neighborhoods make to the strength of a region, or how to include in the metro strategy the tactics that attend to the neighborhood."
Adolfo Carrión, Jr., Director, White House Office of Urban Policy:
“We now know that the average family spends 60 percent of their income on transportation and housing. That is not enough, then, to save or invest or improve the prospects for any family. We need to shift the paradigm. We need to move from affordable housing to affordable living.”
ROUNDTABLE
The Practice and Promise of Comprehensive Community Development
The Roundtable was moderated by Miguel Garcia, Executive Director, LISC/Los Angeles.
Ellen Gilligan, Vice President, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation:
“In the absence of an organization like the Institute that can help document and share lessons, you have to make it up on your own . . . If we have the Institute there to help us at the local level, to document the lessons and inform investors and partners about the work, that’s welcome, because otherwise you have to educate one community and one funder at a time. The Institute can expand and accelerate the work.”
Gordon Chin, Executive Director, Chinatown Community Development Corporation:
“It would be great if the Institute could real quickly take a look back 30 years and say what are the key takeaways, understanding that there is tremendous breadth and diversity in types of comprehensive community initiatives over the years . . . Dig down deeper beyond the obvious outcomes and failures to look at learning.”
Derek Douglas, Special Assistant to the President, White House Domestic Policy Council:
The visits to community initiatives “reinforced for us the importance of the bottom-up approach – not to say that everything is bottom up, because the federal role is you set broad goals – but you allow flexibility at the local level to figure out how best to do things, as opposed to us saying here’s what we want and here’s how we want you to do it.”
SYMPOSIUM
Comprehensive Community Development: Mapping the Way Forward
The symposium was moderated by Margery Austin Turner, Vice President for Research, Urban Institute.
Paul Roldan, President, Hispanic Housing Development Corporation
“The immigrants are there in the economy, paying into the Social Security fund and buying carpeting and cars and sometimes houses, so it is undeniable that they are there. But a fundamental question for me is how can a mother be taken from her children by the INS and sent back to Mexico? We’re paying taxes to have this done. There is something very wrong with not having rules about dealing with this substantial population that is adding to our economy. We need to come to grips with this.”
Paul Williams, Senior Vice President, LISC
“I was really struck by the conversation this morning about how to build lasting capacity. That’s something we’re struggling with at the local level. After the Obama administration, what kind of capacity will be left at the local level? That’s a challenge for us in the LISC world and in the communities.”
Frank Shea, Executive Director, Olneyville Housing Corporation
“It’s great to hear that our approach is being embraced at so many levels, but the challenge is how do we get it to through all the way, from the White House to our state and municipal governments, breaking through these silos to make an impact at the local level, and as soon as possible.”
Erika Poethig, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development:
“Too often interagency collaboration happens in spite of, not because of, our government structure. One of the reasons is that every agency has its own statute, it defines its problems in different ways, uses different metrics to decide how to distribute resources, uses different processes to allocate funding. To line up those different sources of funding and to measure the issues in the same kind of way takes a lot of work by the agencies. It is not an easy process.”
Amy Liu, Deputy Director, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institute
“The cities with the highest poverty rates tend to be older industrial places like Detroit, Youngstown and Buffalo, but interestingly the suburbs with the highest poverty rates tend to be mostly in the Sun Belt: the suburbs of El Paso, Texas; Bakersfield and Fresno, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico . . . reinforcing that most of suburban poverty is predominantly white and Hispanic.”
Bob Weissbourd, RW Ventures LLC:
“We have to move from a view of neighborhoods as static and self-contained, where all we needed to do was organize, to a much more dynamic market-based view where this is really about economics. That has huge implications for federal policy because neighborhoods and regions are part of the same systems and they succeed and fail together.”
Xavier Briggs, Associate Director for General Government Programs, Office of Management and Budget
“Over the last decade we’ve learned a ton about just how common and problematic family residential mobility really is. There is a tendency to associate it with ‘moving to opportunity,’ but what we’ve learned is that it is anything but. Moving is about involuntary factors – loss of income, sickness in the family, loss of an affordable housing unit. It reflects a larger pattern of instability and insecurity. It is high time in the field to take account of just how significant it is, what kinds of families show these patterns and how we might respond to them more effectively.”
Posted in Notes from the Field