You don’t have to look too far to find a technical story about community development. We tend to focus on the development part. We produce housing. We process applications. We provide technical assistance. Piece by piece, we’re building infrastructure to support residents.
But those technical stories are missing something. Community development is emotional. It’s messy. It’s the family whose possessions are on the curb in an eviction. It’s the person who’s renovating a house getting called to know that someone’s broken in and stripped out copper wiring. It’s the family reeling from a shooting. It’s the first-time homebuyer the day they sign the deed. It’s people building community in the block club meeting. It’s the resident-led initiative to document determinants of health.
Just below the technical production and financing are the stories of people … the community part. The built environment helps define what a neighborhood is, but even more powerful is how residents animate that environment. Communities are places of history and culture, struggle and triumph. But as a sector, community development often fails to foreground that very human element – or to engage residents in telling that story themselves.
Over the past year, ThirdSpace has gotten the rare opportunity to unpack these stories with residents. Led by my colleague Dominique Miller and supported by the Community Opportunity Alliance, The Kresge Foundation, a team of literary artists, and a group of place-based community development organizations, we’ve explored what residents think of community development today and where they’d like to see it in the future. In storied places like Brownsville, Dearborn, Memphis, and Richmond, what they shared taps into the legacy of early community development, when the Civil Rights and Black Power movements helped usher in a new approach to building community power.
The fuller research includes a lot of different insights, ones that can be useful in engaging in your own dialogue around resident voice, but there were definitely some key takeaways.
Do People Know the Story of Community Development? It Depends on Who You Ask.
In setting up the research, we tried to be intentional in our collaboration with ACCESS, the Arab American National Museum, bcWORKSHOP, the Center for Transforming Communities, and Richmond LAND; we wanted to reach residents who were really engaged in local community development work, as well as residents who were less engaged. That distinction ended up pretty clear in interviews. Some poured a substantial amount of time and energy into community development work, while others weren’t familiar with local community development at all – or even what it focuses on. The good news is that when local efforts were described, residents across the board saw community development as incredibly important and were overwhelmingly interested in engaging at a deeper level. The bad news is that residents generally did not feel like systems are currently set up to allow for that deeper work.
The Story Is About Addressing Symptoms, But A Fuller Story Would Tackle Causes.
Residents were very supportive of the kinds of direct service community development advances – things like job placement, housing production, and public amenity improvements. They also had an appetite to collaborate on upstream interventions – particularly narrative and policy work – that they believe could have more direct impact on root causes of grassroots challenges and barriers, particularly in communities of color. As the field has gotten more hyper-professionalized, it’s become all too easy to dismiss residents as lacking the “competencies” needed to participate directly. Our interviews suggested that’s an outright falsity; residents came with a sophisticated understanding of policy (particularly around how funding is distributed in local ecosystems) and narrative. This suggests that community development organizations could find natural collaborators and champions through substantial resident engagement – but only if financial support to organizations and residents allow for this kind of deeper partnership.
The Story Is About Money, But Is That Money Hitting the Ground?
Residents made a pretty clear case that knocking down barriers to participation (location, time, and structure of meetings; unpacking jargon; and especially, financially resourcing resident leadership) could result in much more equitable and effective community development. Resident supports could elevate lived experience that would make services work better, expand perspectives that would allow for more nuanced understanding of community priorities and solutions, and create a critical mass of participants that could move the needle on community development policy.
Across the board, it was clear that residents were more than willing to step up to move their communities in a more equitable direction. They were prepared for it, passionate about it, and felt an urgency about it. The real question is whether the sector is also prepared, passionate, and feeling that urgency.
Seth Beattie is Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at ThirdSpace Action Lab, where he focuses on community development learning and strategy. Prior to joining ThirdSpace, he served as senior program officer with The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program, working to advance arts and culture’s role in equitable development. Seth has a bachelor’s of arts from Franklin College and a Master’s of Public Administration from Cleveland State University.