Educate and Empower Tools for Building Community Wealth AUGUST 2015 By Keane Bhatt and Steve dubb educate and empower | 1 educate and empower | 2 How do low-income communities learn to advance economically and build wealth? Low-income communities and communities of color, in challenging structural economic and social inequality, have historically grappled with tensions inherent to development. Who participates in, directs, and ultimately owns the economic-development process? In creating and sustaining new, inclusive economic institutions, how do community members cultivate and pass on skills, commitment and knowledge—especially among those who have long faced barriers to education and employment? And how should communities strike an appropriate balance between utilizing local knowledge and accessing outside expertise? This report draws on case studies of 11 different community economic development initiatives from across the United States to highlight a diverse set of powerful answers to these critical questions. educate and empower | 3 The Democracy Collaborative The Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit organization founded in 2000, is a national leader in equitable, inclusive, and sustainable development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. This initiative encompasses a wide range of Advisory, Research and Field Building activities aiding the work of on-the-ground practitioners working to transform the practice of community economic development in the United States. Our staff and associates are engaged in a variety of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset- based paradigm of economic development and assist greater use of transformative strategies by community stakeholders, foundations, anchor institutions, and policymakers. Our mission is to help shift the prevailing paradigm of economic development—and of the economy as a whole—toward a new system that is place-based, inclusive, collaborative, and ecologically sustainable. The community wealth building approach to economic development focuses on building many kinds of local wealth, employing local, broad-based ownership models, and creating social and financial ecosystems of support. Authors Keane Bhatt ([email protected]) is Senior Associate for Strategy and Policy, The Next System Project at The Democracy Collaborative. He is an experienced activist and organizer, having worked both in the U.S. and in Latin America on a variety of campaigns and projects related to community development and social justice. His analysis and opinions have appeared in a range of outlets, including The Nation, NPR, St. Petersburg Times, The Providence Journal, CNN En Español, Pacifica Radio, and Truthout. Steve Dubb ([email protected]) is Director of Special Projects and Senior Advisor to the President at The Democracy Collaborative and has been with the Collaborative since 2004. In addition to his research and project- based consulting work, Steve regularly represents the Collaborative at public events and conferences. At the Collaborative, Steve has written a wide body of work. In 2005, Steve was the lead author of Building Wealth: The New Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems, published by The Aspen Institute. This report also served as the basis for the original Community-Wealth.org website, which has expanded greatly since in its initial launch in May 2005. In 2007, Steve wrote a report on the role of universities in community economic development (Linking Colleges to Communities: Engaging the University for Community Development). Since then, Steve has been the author or co-author of reports on many topics, including community wealth building public policy (Rebuilding America’s Communities) and the importance of community wealth building in meeting sustainability goals (Growing a Green Economy for all and Climate Change, Community Stability and the Next 150 Million Americans). Steve has also co-authored a number of articles on political economy with Democracy Collaborative cofounder Gar Alperovitz and has written extensively on the role of anchor institutions (often known as “eds and meds”) in community wealth building. This includes being a co-author (with Rita Axelroth Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads (published by MSU Press in 2012) and, in 2013, leading the research team that produced The Anchor Dashboard, which aims to provide a framework for hospitals and universities to assess and improve their impact in low and moderate-income communities. Published August 2015. Copyright © 2015 by The Democracy Collaborative This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en_US Design by Christina Williams and Kate Khatib. Illustrations c/o Kacie Mills and Laura Brewer-Yarnall. The Democracy Collaborative www.DemocracyCollaborative.org 6930 Carroll Ave., Suite 501 For additional copies or information, contact [email protected] Takoma Park, MD 20912 4 | educate and empower Preface Can low-income communities create economic institutions that enable residents to build community wealth? This question animates Educate and Empower, a report that takes a hard look at the question of capacity building and the ways in which communities can become agents of community wealth building and empowerment. Authors Keane Bhatt and Steve Dubb examine eleven case studies of wealth building initiatives across the country. Some are storied models: Newark, New Jersey-based New Community Corporation, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community development corporations, began operations in 1967 in the crucible of the community’s collective response to urban unrest. Others represent more recent innovation: the Wellspring Cooperatives in Worcester, Massachusetts are a start-up effort that seeks to demonstrate that it is possible to leverage anchor institution procurement to develop a network of employee-owned cooperatives, even with limited resources. The range of examples is inspiring: community organizing-led initiatives like Dudley Street Neighbors, Inc. in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston and People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) in Buffalo; technical assistance backbone institutions such as the Ohio Employee Ownership Center and the Paraprofessional Health Institute; anchor institution-led efforts such as Syracuse University’s Near Westside Initiative; and comprehensive community planning strategies like Market Creek Plaza in San Diego. From these case studies, Bhatt and Dubb identify a range of “best practices” that can inform future community building work going forward. These include highlighting the importance of incorporating popular education techniques in community economic development (such as visual representations so that community members can co-develop master plans), prioritizing youth and leadership development, dedicating consistent attention to learning opportunities and training, and employing study circles to build group knowledge. As this report shows, even old-fashioned strategies such as knocking on individual house and apartment doors to build community cohesion and identify key priorities can also be of critical importance. Too often, community economic development has been reduced to technical work, such as developing pro formas, raising capital, and “doing the deal.” These are all essential elements, to be sure. But if these steps are not accompanied by capacity building, community development can end up being done to, rather than with communities. This report identifies steps that can be taken by practitioners, national intermediaries, and philanthropy to incorporate an inclusive practice of community capacity building into community wealth building projects. educate and empower | 5 Of course, this work is not easy. There are, indeed, real tensions inherent in community economic development that common (and simplistic) formulations such as “top down” or “bottom up” fail to capture. As Bhatt and Dubb show, the best work really combines both elements in effective ways, tapping into internal and external knowledge and skills in a manner that builds internal community capacity rather than making the common mistakes of either undermining community authority, or, equally problematic, having the community flounder because the technical assistance support is inadequate. The case studies examined here illustrate that this balance can be achieved—but not without challenges or difficulty. Our hope is that this report sparks a more nuanced discussion of how to best tap into local and outside expertise to build the community economic institutions our neighborhoods so desperately need. Ted Howard President, The Democracy Collaborative Cleveland, Ohio 6 | educate and empower Acknowledgments This report began with a simple yet complicated question: how do we build the capacity of disinvested communities to dream, invest, and develop an economy that empowers them? In seeking to address this question, we drew on the contributions of many dozens of people. Without their hard-won experiences and generosity with their time, our work would simply not have been possible. We would like to thank Rita Axelroth Hodges for both helping to guide this inquiry in preliminary background interviews as well as carefully reviewing the rough manuscript to provide invaluable feedback. May Louie offered us an extremely detailed,