ISSUE #06:

We chatted with Emi Wang, Director of Capacity Building at The Greenlining Institute, to discuss community leadership and power building in policymaking.

Can you tell me more about yourself and the work that you do? How did you get into this space?

Emi: At The Greenlining Institute, we seek to address the economic losses for communities of color associated with practices of redlining. The work of our Capacity Building team is based around a concept of bridge building. We support communities with partnership development, vision development, bringing in financial resources, advancing policy campaigns, and building up community ownership and power over our own neighborhoods. We focus on how we can improve aspects of the built environment to improve environmental justice and public health outcomes. We are network weavers through our four locations in California, between the policy apparatus and community-based organizations. We connect the dots between what we hear as community priorities and visions to levers in funding or policy so that community leaders can advance a policy campaign or fund the thing that they want to do.

I always knew that I wanted to work with communities and in a justice-based framework, but I didn’t know quite what that looked like or what that meant. In my early 20s, I knew temperamentally I wasn’t going to be directly on the frontlines, but I wanted to work with communities and support community leadership in some way. I started working in Brooklyn, New York, offering $5,000 microgrants and community organizing training to grassroots volunteer groups like community gardens, tenant associations, and block associations. We had a network approach, and that helped me realize the value in resource sharing, leadership development, and capacity building. I didn’t call it that then, but that translated into the work that I do now, which is also supporting existing community leadership with the tools, resources, training, and money to take their own visions and run with it. 

That’s great. And you are the Director of Capacity Building now. What does capacity building mean to you? 

Emi: We define capacity building as supporting community planning, community partnerships, community project readiness, with an eye towards power building. If you work with a community around partnerships or planning, you translate that into tangible projects, whether that’s policy or a capital project, a discrete deliverable or outcome. But it also ladders up to wider-spread community power building and self-determination over neighborhoods. That’s capacity building.

Emi: The Capacity Building team aims to better connect the community and the policy side, to create a genuine feedback loop between those two sides of the house. It’s a work in progress to align those two pieces. We are trying to root our policymaking in the lived experiences of communities. But structurally, we are just starting to build the internal infrastructure to achieve that goal. We are a policy organization first, not a base-building organization. We have policy teams who do policy campaigns on short timelines that require insider information and technical expertise. We’re now trying to build in more intentionality and more feedback loops to the communities we work with. The other thing is scale. Our work is California-wide, and many organizations are neighborhood-based. What does it mean for us to reflect community voices? What does it mean to work for communities of color in California?

Can you speak more to wrestling with this tension between being a policy organization and a power-building organization? What does it mean to be like building up leadership?

Emi: We’re asking, what does it mean for us to support existing community leadership while also offering our recommendation and direction? What is the balance between following existing community priorities and vision, which is one of our values, but also when we see a set of conditions and opportunities, to propose something that the community may not be thinking of? We’re often straddling between the two. It makes sense that community partners might be oriented to direct service, so they might not propose the policy. It is up to us to take what we hear of their challenges, their vision for their neighborhood, and extrapolate a little bit. We have to share from the policy side, we think this could be interesting and relevant for you. We negotiate with that tension, knowing when to lead and when to step back, and how to be respectful and in service of community, but also bring value add to our local partners.

So much of it is just so relational. Do you have any examples of strategies that you find are advancing racial equity through leadership or policy? 

Emi: We’re trying something new this year that we’re calling the Community Policy Lab. It is an intentional effort to source and ground our policymaking in community. We have a broad list of challenges from our partners around community development. We know it is challenging to access resources to do neighborhood projects. Systems can be inaccessible, bureaucratic, time-consuming. What would it look like for us to take that list of community-identified challenges and propose policy ideas from it? We’ve narrowed it down to seven broad concepts. One includes reform of public funding. There simply isn’t enough progressive financing and funding for all the things that we need. What local revenue generation models are out there, and how would you structure that to be internally progressive, sustainable, and long-term? Or looking at how money flows from the federal government to states, to local jurisdictions. What is the responsibility of a local jurisdiction to spend its maintenance budget equitably amongst redlined neighborhoods? We’re embarking on this exploration process, asking what’s the challenge? What’s a potential policy solution? Has it been done before? Are we the right people to do it? How far can we take it? We’re still early, in the challenge identification phase. But I’m excited to see where this goes. And I’m curious to see what other models are already out there.

In the research, we kept hearing that the work is so emotional and that can lead to burnout. Where do you go to get recharged?

Emi: I get recharged in community and with community. The set of conditions and the structural barriers and inequities that exist in our society are real. They’re depressing. They can be hard to manage. And when I’m with people at the neighborhood level, how you think about macro systems around ending structural racism, ending economic inequality, are filtered by that neighborhood scale. You are in community with folks who are coming together and are making tangible changes in a process or outcomes. Taking a vacant lot and reclaiming it, or advancing more democratic processes. That helps me to refuel. I still get tired, but being in community and seeing those tangible changes make a difference in people’s lives. 

Is there anything else that you wanted to uplift regarding leadership in community development?

Emi: The system is not built for leaders of color and low-income leaders to thrive in the community development system as a whole. The groups that we are working with are interested in developing resiliency hubs and planting trees. They are thinking about solar and micromobility, and they are thrust into this position of constructing capital projects, which may not have been where they started. They may have started as a neighborhood organizing group, but they look around at their built environment, around their block, and they see the changes that need to be made. So they enter into the community development system, which is incredibly hard to navigate. There is a vanguard of really exciting community leadership. We need to figure out ways to dismantle the barriers that make it hard to access that system so that we can have more flourishing tapestries of community-owned infrastructure of all kinds.

As part of our research dive into leadership in the community development sector, we talked with Shanti Abedin about how the Risk and Risk Aversion narrative shows up in Black-led organizations, and how we could mitigate these effects.

Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Shanti: I’m the Vice President of Housing and Community Development at the National Fair Housing Alliance, a national civil rights organization dedicated to eradicating housing discrimination and its lingering impact in communities in all of its forms. A large part of this work is remedying the impact of both historical and present day housing and lending discrimination. This includes allocating community relief funds from settlements to a national network of partners, who are often community development organizations and affordable housing providers. Our objective is to make communities whole after they’ve experienced decades of discrimination and disinvestment. 

A growing area of focus for us has been to ensure that we can still use the full suite of tools made available to us through civil rights-era legislation, like the federal Fair Housing Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act, that have provisions that not only make discrimination illegal but also aim to remedy the effects of long-standing discrimination that has locked people of color and other marginalized groups out of homeownership, access to credit, and full investment in their neighborhoods. 

What are some major challenges you have observed for community development practitioners of color or their organizations?

Shanti: I’ve seen burnout and a need for rest, grounding, and sustaining oneself for the long haul. Leaders of color in this space in particular deal with extra challenges around systemic discrimination. And many small organizations have founders who have been there for 40 years. They might be the individual trusted in the community rather than the entire organization as a whole, and that not only places a lot on their backs but also inhibits the ability for the organization as a whole to have a wider impact – today or in the future. 

We need to sustain leadership beyond one person. And we need to sustain individuals. One promising practice I have seen is using a sabbatical to start building that process of sharing institutional knowledge, handing off work, and letting other people at the organization elevate themselves. It also has the added effect of allowing long-time leaders to rest and come back to their work renewed.

In the community development field, accessing large amounts of capital is another major challenge, whether financing for an affordable housing development project or federal or private philanthropic grants for other types of activities and projects. There is often a focus on funding based on the track record of an organization’s existing work. In other words, how many projects have they successfully completed to date? How large is their operating budget? These are seen as risk mitigating factors that determine whether an organization is going to be considered creditworthy and successful in a project. 

As we fund settlement-related activities, we often want to see partners and grantees who are ready to hit the ground running, because we’re not a long-term funder where we can build a relationship over time. We come in with funds from a one-time infusion of settlement funds, and we want it to be spent quickly. But there can be this tension – the majority of larger community development organizations with long track records of successful projects are often white-led, and not just the CEO but also sometimes the board of directors or the entire leadership team.

Because of structural inequities, there needs to be intentionality around building different ways to establish confidence in organizations with the right balance of experience, representation, and alignment with community plans. How can we peel back some of our expectations around track record, size, budget and development experience to place value around other types of experience, grounding in community, and track records of a different kind? 

For example, I’ve worked with national organizations that look at the financial health of organizations and organizational sustainability. It can be the practice to rank groups on their confidence level to receive grants or investments. But the groups that are most often identified as lower on the confidence scale, with higher risk rating,s are often BIPOC-led. And sometimes that makes them ineligible for grant funding. We need to critically ask why that is. I don’t believe those organizations actually bring more risk. It could be implicit bias in assessment processes. It could be that these organizations face more obstacles, and not all funders factor these aspects into their eligibility assessments. Governmental entities are so compliance-focused and risk-averse that it is a self-perpetuating cycle without intentionally disruptive processes.

It sounds like we need to balance this, especially from organizations that are likely under-resourced. Are there specific supports that could be offered either for leaders or organizations that could help mitigate their “risk” status or enhance their competitiveness?

Shanti: The more you automate something, remove the context from a decision, and make generalizations about what numbers indicate risk, the more likely you are to perpetuate bias that is built into those indicators. For example, requiring a certain budget line doesn’t account for how difficult it is for a Black-led organization to raise funds compared to a white-led organization. In addition to those metrics, a funder needs to build familiarity with the organization, know their community context and strengths in a bigger picture. There could be organizations that fall under a particular budget requirement, but when you look at the way that they are embedded in a community, there’s an additional confidence in their work. You can look at the longevity, effectiveness, or connectedness of an organization in a community or other aspects of success that are not easy to see on paper. 

We see this especially during a crisis. Often the resources are made available on a very short timeframe, whether through a federal effort, national organizations, or philanthropy. Large national entities are responsible for deploying huge amounts of money quickly. But often with speed, you lose equity. You lose the ability to dive deeper and consider who is left out and why because of the competing priority around processing applications and deploying resources quickly. It happened during the foreclosure crisis and with COVID-19 relief funds. How do we build up a diverse range of people to be ready for those types of opportunities and ensure we can still deploy resources quickly to hardest hit communities without leaving anyone behind? 

We need to design programs intentionally to account for discrimination in the community development field, and we need to ensure that those tools aren’t abandoned because of challenges in the courts against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Because we do have real, legal mechanisms to counteract discrimination in housing and credit, for example, and we can’t be afraid to use them. 

There are roundtables and special purpose credit programs that are specifically designed for developers of color. We could enhance this by setting aside funds for a program specifically designed to remediate discrimination that can be more flexible. For example, maybe a federal program has a certain budget threshold that they build in, and then maybe they could have another pot of money that is deployed with a different set of criteria that allows a more diverse range of partners and grantees. With those funds could also include additional support, whether coaching, or more money to fill in a capital stack. We should design opportunities to deliberately counteract the fact that there is bias built into any system.

As part of our research dive into leadership in the community development sector, we talked to Christa Stoneham about how fear and conviction can impact what community development leadership can accomplish (or fail to accomplish).

Let’s start with who you are and how you are connected to the work.

Christa: Growing up in California, I witnessed firsthand the rapid displacement and unaffordability that deeply impacted my family and other communities. Attending Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU built on a former slave plantation, profoundly opened my eyes to the power of leadership and the potential for transformative change. It helped me better understand the systems that have shaped where we are today. I remember being told I had to choose between being an architect or a planner, but I wanted to be both. I wanted to design not just the buildings but the communities they were part of.

Today, I believe I’m the fifth Black woman to lead a land bank in the entire country. What surprised me the most was how few land banks are led by people of color, particularly Black leaders, despite the fact that land banks are specifically created to revitalize vacant and underutilized properties into productive use, often in Black and brown neighborhoods. However, just because a property is being revitalized doesn’t guarantee the process is equitable.

My mission is to bring hope and drive meaningful, lasting change. I chose to work in community development after meeting someone who looked like me. It made me realize I could do more than just design. I could make decisions that would sustain communities for generations. I no longer see myself solely as an architect; I now consider myself an architect of systems change.

What do you think would help increase that visibility of representation? 

Christa: Creating spaces where we can connect and collaborate is essential. In January, we hosted a summit for diverse developers, and it was incredibly refreshing to see so many Black leaders from across the country, each making strides in their respective areas. They are building tiny homes, promoting historic preservation, and even launching new banks. However, when these efforts are siloed, you can feel as though you’re the only one working toward change. You miss the bigger picture. That’s why building a sense of community is so critical. It fosters collaboration, shared knowledge, and solidarity, which are vital to sustaining and growing this work.

Can you speak to some of the challenges related to political, social opposition to racially explicit programming in community development? How do you prepare to respond to some of these challenges?

Christa: We hold so much potential to effect change, yet some are afraid to act because they fear losing their seat. For example, we had a funder pull out, and I believe they used anti-affirmative action policies as an excuse. There are ways to work around these barriers, like focusing on zip codes instead of race, but not everyone is willing to take that stand. What’s disheartening is that this particular funder is a person of color, yet they weren’t willing to risk anything. And that’s fine; it’s their choice. But I won’t dilute or sugarcoat my message to make anyone comfortable when I’m speaking for people who need my voice. Yes, it can feel scary, and the line between faith and fear is often razor-thin, but I refuse to let fear silence me when so much is at stake. We must be willing to confront the aftermath of the intentional barriers placed on people of color. These challenges aren’t just about race; they affect the collective potential of communities to thrive. Accepting this reality and addressing it head-on is the only way we can create equitable, lasting change.

At the same time, it’s important to speak to the power of possibility and the fundamental connection we all share as human beings. People may not fully grasp the specific challenges that come with being Black or brown, but we all have compassion, dreams, and aspirations for our families. We all want to create a better future. When I speak, I tap into that universal desire for a better tomorrow while still being clear about the deep, systemic issues that we need to address. I balance speaking truth to power and the shared humanity that binds us all.

What gaps are you seeing in the field offerings for community development leaders overall?

Christa: Houston has a strong presence of Black real estate professionals, but there is a notable lack of Black developers. Additionally, the environmental sector is largely dominated by white men. Environmental justice often discusses community engagement, but no one in the room reflects the communities they claim to serve. I actively navigate various fields, from architecture to planning and real estate, because there is a lack of integration among these industries. This disconnect extends among leaders of color within these fields, which is a missed opportunity for collaboration and impact.

In the past, my focus was solely on getting the work done, staying in the background. But over time, I realized that the people in leadership positions were just there for the optics. It made me angry. This is a real call to action for what can be achieved for our communities and future generations. The question is: what are you doing about it? That’s when I decided I couldn’t stay silent any longer. Now, I volunteer, I show up, and I’m unapologetically myself. When I speak, I’m intentional about advocating for solutions in historically redlined communities.

In this field, you can be trained on any technology or take public speaking classes to refine your skills, but real leadership comes from within. It’s about your will, your mindset, and understanding your mission. What do you truly represent? At the end of the day, it’s not about your background or the color of your skin. It’s about what you do with your time, how you use your voice, and what’s in your heart. How are you showing up? That’s what defines you.

So what types of support do you feel like would be the most impactful for leaders of color?

Christa: I would prioritize mental health, especially because I’ve endured attacks simply for being myself. Sometimes, having a bright light can make others feel as though their own light is dimmed. That’s why I needed a safe space outside of work. I’ve found that space in a women’s mentorship community, Go Bravely, led by Dr. Shelly Ann Gajadhar, where we focus on speaking our truth, discovering who we are, and doing so boldly.

Mentorship is also critical. When the National Land Bank Network told me I was only the fifth Black woman in my position in the country, my immediate response was, “Who are the others?” We need a sense of community, especially as community development practitioners. Having a mentor who has navigated similar challenges and understands the unique hurdles we face is invaluable. 

Finally, we need ongoing, dedicated training to stay aligned with the evolving trends in our field. How can we ensure we’re speaking the same language when engaging with funders? The conversation may no longer center on George Floyd. Now issues like sustainability are at the forefront. The core issues remain the same, but the terminology shifts. Our training needs to evolve alongside these trends to ensure leaders are equipped to address both the current and future needs of the profession.