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.

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.

Emi leads the Greenlining Institute’s Capacity Building team, which supports under-resourced communities across California and nationally to gain equitable opportunity and access to tools to lead their own transformations. Working with local partners, she helped to catalyze a collaborative community-led process in South Stockton to secure $35 million in green capital investments through the Transformative Climate Communities program.