In today’s community development sector, we as practitioners are all time travelers hurdling back and forward without a user manual for the time machine. Ten years of foreclosure data. Year three of the five-year master plan. Four-week window for “community engagement” with residents who’ve been self-organizing for the past decade. Final report due in 30 days. Helping the resident that just got a 30-day eviction notice. Trying to shore up the finances of the small business that’s been anchoring the corridor for 60 years … before community development was even a “thing”. Working to dismantle 400 years of structural racism in one-year grant periods.

We need a better user manual. We need a better time machine. Historic community development and planning policies have ended up concentrating the impacts of structural racism and poverty within narrow geographies. If we don’t understand and reckon with the history that shaped community development – really understand it and really reckon with it – we won’t be well-equipped to address the consequences of decades of intentional segregation.  If we don’t give the sector the space to put aside at least some urgent needs and pressing deadlines, we’re not going to have the time to build a collective vision of what a better future can look like – and that severely limits our ability to chip away at wealth disparities, health disparities, and disparities in how much voice and power there are between white people and people of color in the United States.

In this issue, we step back from the 30-day deadline to look at the bigger picture. We invite you to review our History of the Sector research and then to join our writers and artists in exploration.

What does the origin of the community development sector tell us about what we should be focusing on today? What could a future with anti-racist community development look like, feel like, result in? Who’s holding space in the sector today for radical imagination, and what does that look like? Who holds the power in community development to dictate our “collective when”? These are big questions, but important ones if we want to move from lurching from task to task without a clear view of the bigger structural picture, where we’ve been, and where we’re trying to go. Step away from the e-mail, step away from the phone, and join us in a better time travel. Onward.