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.

Shanti Abedin is the Vice President of Housing and Community Development at the National Fair Housing Alliance. She oversees NFHA’s investments and work in communities throughout the nation to increase affordable housing, reduce barriers to equitable housing opportunities, increase quality amenities and services in communities of color, and broaden the network of organizations working to advance fair housing goals.