Thanks for this great post, Elwood. What particularly resonated with me was your second insight: that communities perform different functions and don’t need to be a middle class ideal. As you said, root causes of poverty are systemic and need to be addressed through public policy—and pursued at the same time as place-based initiatives.
We do “Community Solutions Assessments” to discern causes & contributing factors to key community issues. Understanding the particular local dynamics that drive community trends is an essential first step. You can check out our latest Solutions Assessment for Glynn county, GA at http://issuu.com/excellenceingiving/docs/glynn_county_community_solutions_pr. A local foundation is using the results to create an informed strategy for their giving. Every community foundation should have a solutions assessment, with larger counties and cities doing multiple assessments to account for place-based particulars.
I am very intrigued by this article and some of its postulations. However, I would also like to submit, for consideration, that I wonder if what is at the root cause for sustained poverty is its concentration and that over the past 60 years or so, those of us with means have chosen to segregate ourselves, financially. So often the goal is to provide services and improvements to “them” when what may be a deciding factor is those of us with means redistributing our resources simply by making more intentional choices about where we live. I have heard this called “gentrification with justice”.
I love the focus on opportunity here. Middle class is not an identity, it is a label. It ignores potential, free will, transience and transcendence. But when we focus on opportunity rather than status, we encourage personal and communal development and discovery.
We cannot own a meaningful life. (Ask any person of wealth. They know it best.) So we cannot hope to build a healthy, connected community only by material and financial means.
Still, we can celebrate shelter, security, safety, creativity. We can seek to create new paradigms (social enterprise, impact investing, community-based social entrepreneurship), which seek to build community values and outcomes into market entities. We can listen to each other. We can, in the words of Amy Cuddy, “fake it till we become it.”
Thank you, Ellwood. I really enjoyed your essay - clear-eyed about problems, quietly hopeful about new approaches. The insights guide us to a nuanced approach where the first step is understanding. I’m grateful for your work in this sector.
But here’s a question.
Doesn’t a new “strategy for alleviating poverty” depend on the mindset of the participants? It strikes me that spatial redevelopment depends on spiritual redevelopment. (And one of the reasons for the Harlem Children’s Zone success is the authentic and accessible and transcendent story it offers to community members.)
We all need a place to be and become, but first we need a story of belonging to help us transition. How can we seed these stories - authentic, disruptive, hopeful, and full of opportunity - in the minds of everyone involved?
Interesting essay but not convincing. You could write an essay with the same scope and supporting evidence on how place based initiatives are for the most part not successful. I like the growth in strategic approaches to this work however wonder whether the models become quickly out of date as communities that are primarily poor are different today than they were even ten years ago. There are two areas that I believe place based strategies have often missed. First, I rarely see the increase in the political involvement of the community that is being served as an objective. This is a must not only because it’s the most immediate resource that could lead to change and bring more resources to make these initiatives sustainable and not just short term investments by the philanthropic community. Second, there is often a bias to funding services that are primarily for the poorest of the poor. Often services that exist in middle class communities are missed because there is an assumption that there is no need for these services. Finally, it would also be interesting to consider scale. The current administration’s attempt to scale the Harlem Children’s Zone was limited because of political opposition to full funding. The reasons for not fully funding the initiative were primarily political however they were also based on evidence from a substantial study. I love the idea of place based initiatives and have had success at certain levels in the implementation of these however think that for these to be success old assumptions need to be questioned and the vision needs to be substantially greater than what we’re seeing these days.
Thank you for reading the piece, Regina! My friend Bob Ross, who heads the California Endowment, likes to refer to the need to pursue local initiatives and policy agendas at the same time as working from “Grassroots to Treetops.” He has actually rebuilt the foundation with a bifurcated structure that operates place-based initiatives in fourteen communities while advancing supportive policy development at the statewide level.
Thank you Kirk—you raise an excellent point. It can be argued, as Peter Dreier at Occidental does, that concentrated poverty is linked the emergence of concentrated wealth. And that “poor ghettos” are the flip side of “rich ghettos.” I think some of the really cutting edge work in this field is focused not so much on improving the conditions of low-income communities—which is important—but on the creation of mixed income communities. If you don’t know it already, you might take a look at the work being done by Mark Joseph, who runs the National Initiative on Mixed Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University. He and his team are really onto something.
Paul— Thank you for sharing your Community Solutions Assessment. It has been so hard for the field to develop instruments that strike the right balance between neighborhood data profiles and needs assessments on one hand, and guidelines for action on the other. What I like about this is that it synthesizes the information into clear trends that practitioners can respond to. And it helps shape a narrative about where the community is going that residents and local leaders (as well as other staekholders) can participate in.
Can you say a bit more about your organization and how this instrument is used? I’d be grateful, and I think others would, too.
What an incredibly thoughtful, insightful response. It’s easy for people in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors to get so caught up in the language of strategy and social engineering that the heart/mind connection gets forgotten. And in the end, the real root source of change is that spiritual focus—and mental shifts in perception.
One of the very few people I know who knows how to integrate this awareness into real world community development strategies is my friend and colleague Rich Harwood at the Harwood Institute. He has his arms around what it means to understand and support positive attitudes at the individual and community level, and his “Community Rhythms methodology” puts structure on the development of a community’s narrative about itself. If you don’t know his work, I think you might really appreciate it. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Over the last week, I organized an event called “Prioritizing Place: A National Forum on Place-Based Initiatives” at the USC Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy. We had leaders who have dedicated their lives to place-based work reflecting on the last fifty years, and one of the key reflections was that the concept of “resident engagement” has seldom been elevated to the level of genuine political involvement. It is crucial for the reasons you mention as well as for the potential to create broader constituencies for change across many low-income neighborhoods—a scale of organizing that could create meaningful policy change.
Also I agree with you that there is often a bias for funding services to the poorest of the poor at the expense of others who might benefit more quickly from support. In an environment where social service funding is perceived to be limited, foundations and nonprofits tend to focus it to those in greatest need—which is both understandable and justifiable. One positive result of this that I have started to observe however, is that some some social service strategies have been designed that achieve scale by differentiating between client needs. In a given community, for example, a large service agency can provide professional case management or medical interventions to those who have the most acute needs, while networks of paraprofessional promotaras or popular educators reach out to those who need lighter forms of support.
Another critique that I believe could also be made is that the nonprofit sector sometimes looks to social services as a solution where it is not always needed. This is not to say that social services do not play a crucial function but that sometimes when we have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Finally, your critique of the limitations of scale in place-based initiatives is also well taken. PolicyLink, which helped distill the Harlem Children’s Zone model for replication by DOE, did an excellent job of designing a process that could achieve some scale. But as you point out, limited political will led to a limited number of sites. Part of the future of this field is the need to get beyond top-down replication of place-based initiatives from national foundations and federal agencies. If we are ever going to observe responses at a scale commensurate with the scale of the problem, we will need more decentralized approaches that grow organically and mobilize local resources.
Elwood, first please forgive me for spelling your name wrong in my first comment.
Second, thank you for your thorough and informative responses to all of us who were moved to comment on your piece. I will definitely try to find out more about Rich Harwood’s work. Sounds wonderful.
And since your consultancy works with banks on financial inclusion issues, I thought you might be interested in this donor guide I wrote with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors for the GAFIS project http://gafis.net/financial-inclusion-guide-rpa-gafis/
Thanks for the feedback on our Community Solutions Assessment! Shaping a simple narrative so people know where the community is going and how to participate is a tall task, and we hope our report makes it possible in each community where foundations sponsor it.
At Excellence in Giving, we function as a shared family foundation office for about 20 high-capacity givers across the country. For 12 years we have refined our methods for sharpening each foundation’s focus and executing grant strategies whose results years later bring great joy to all involved. We designed the Community Solutions Assessment to bridge the gap between needs our clients observe in their community and smart giving choices they could make to drive improvement. Needs assessments and profiles describe the problem but provide no wisdom about promising or proven solutions! Since we know a few well-crafted grants won’t move the needle, we created a community report rooted in qualitative and quantitative research but easily readable by all stakeholders. The goal is both to inform a foundation’s local giving while also providing a community narrative to direct local government policy, local volunteers, nonprofit programs, and other significant givers and groups.
I did my first community assessment in Knoxville, TN in 1999 for what would become the Compassion Coalition of Knoxville (http://www.compassioncoalition.org). The guidebook we produced would have had little impact, but the years spent training people/organizations and directing activities in light of the research has made a difference. We know in some communities our narrative will not be adopted, owned and updated, but we do interview 50+ community leaders along the way and have those interested review it before the final report. For the new Glynn County Georgia Assessment (http://issuu.com/excellenceingiving/docs/glynn_county_community_solutions_pr), the family foundation is deciding how to structure their local grant making right now in light of the assessment and part of what they might do is ask us to educate more givers and leaders in the community with our findings. We hope it does rally not only the foundation that sponsored it but also more community members who want to fuel positive momentum and change the direction of other negative community trends with promising or proven solutions we identified. We hope to launch a couple more Community Solution Assessments with private or community foundations this year.
Intriguing article. I think most successful place-based initiatives are organic in nature. The problem is that the changes prescribed for such initiatives are often conceived in far away boardrooms by people who have little connection to the communities they intend to help. Perhaps the biggest boondoggle of this type was Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages which actually distributed a 147 page guidebook written by academics, detailing how rural villages in Africa could escape from poverty. If the villagers simply followed the guidebook, they were told, they would leave the ranks of the poor within 5 years. (It goes without saying that the Millennium Villages didn’t pan out exactly as Mr. Sachs’ had hoped.) Compare that to the Orangi Pilot Project, in which a large squatter community in Karachi designed, financed, and built their own sanitation system. Better examples of successful place-based initiatives can be found all over the world where newcomers - be they internal migrants or immigrants - revitalize once derelict neighborhoods, rehabilitate housing stock, open businesses, and turn lemons into lemonade. poorpeopleblog.com
place-based poverty alleviating strategies certainly have a place in the overall fight against poverty. to people in the community these initiatives really work
something else to consider is the integration of technology in place based development. The idea of smart cities is upon us and it will definitely be take advantage for and by the communities with the most resources at first. What if place based initiatives took the initiative and attempted to make lower income communities leaders in this area. I can only imagine the algorithms that would be designed.Here’s a good article http://qz.com/312879#1/the-plans-for-how-smart-cities-will-predict-the-future/
something else to consider is the integration of technology in place based development. The idea of smart cities is upon us and it will definitely be take advantage for and by the communities with the most resources at first. What if place based initiatives took the initiative and attempted to make lower income communities leaders in this area. I can only imagine the algorithms that would be designed.Here’s a good article http://qz.com/312879#1/the-plans-for-how-smart-cities-will-predict-the-future/
COMMENTS
BY Regina Starr Ridley
ON December 4, 2014 11:44 AM
Thanks for this great post, Elwood. What particularly resonated with me was your second insight: that communities perform different functions and don’t need to be a middle class ideal. As you said, root causes of poverty are systemic and need to be addressed through public policy—and pursued at the same time as place-based initiatives.
BY Paul Penley
ON December 4, 2014 01:39 PM
We do “Community Solutions Assessments” to discern causes & contributing factors to key community issues. Understanding the particular local dynamics that drive community trends is an essential first step. You can check out our latest Solutions Assessment for Glynn county, GA at http://issuu.com/excellenceingiving/docs/glynn_county_community_solutions_pr. A local foundation is using the results to create an informed strategy for their giving. Every community foundation should have a solutions assessment, with larger counties and cities doing multiple assessments to account for place-based particulars.
BY Kirk Wester
ON December 4, 2014 01:43 PM
I am very intrigued by this article and some of its postulations. However, I would also like to submit, for consideration, that I wonder if what is at the root cause for sustained poverty is its concentration and that over the past 60 years or so, those of us with means have chosen to segregate ourselves, financially. So often the goal is to provide services and improvements to “them” when what may be a deciding factor is those of us with means redistributing our resources simply by making more intentional choices about where we live. I have heard this called “gentrification with justice”.
BY Steven Crandell
ON December 5, 2014 09:38 PM
I love the focus on opportunity here. Middle class is not an identity, it is a label. It ignores potential, free will, transience and transcendence. But when we focus on opportunity rather than status, we encourage personal and communal development and discovery.
We cannot own a meaningful life. (Ask any person of wealth. They know it best.) So we cannot hope to build a healthy, connected community only by material and financial means.
Still, we can celebrate shelter, security, safety, creativity. We can seek to create new paradigms (social enterprise, impact investing, community-based social entrepreneurship), which seek to build community values and outcomes into market entities. We can listen to each other. We can, in the words of Amy Cuddy, “fake it till we become it.”
Thank you, Ellwood. I really enjoyed your essay - clear-eyed about problems, quietly hopeful about new approaches. The insights guide us to a nuanced approach where the first step is understanding. I’m grateful for your work in this sector.
But here’s a question.
Doesn’t a new “strategy for alleviating poverty” depend on the mindset of the participants? It strikes me that spatial redevelopment depends on spiritual redevelopment. (And one of the reasons for the Harlem Children’s Zone success is the authentic and accessible and transcendent story it offers to community members.)
We all need a place to be and become, but first we need a story of belonging to help us transition. How can we seed these stories - authentic, disruptive, hopeful, and full of opportunity - in the minds of everyone involved?
BY Lee Reagan
ON December 6, 2014 12:59 PM
Interesting essay but not convincing. You could write an essay with the same scope and supporting evidence on how place based initiatives are for the most part not successful. I like the growth in strategic approaches to this work however wonder whether the models become quickly out of date as communities that are primarily poor are different today than they were even ten years ago. There are two areas that I believe place based strategies have often missed. First, I rarely see the increase in the political involvement of the community that is being served as an objective. This is a must not only because it’s the most immediate resource that could lead to change and bring more resources to make these initiatives sustainable and not just short term investments by the philanthropic community. Second, there is often a bias to funding services that are primarily for the poorest of the poor. Often services that exist in middle class communities are missed because there is an assumption that there is no need for these services. Finally, it would also be interesting to consider scale. The current administration’s attempt to scale the Harlem Children’s Zone was limited because of political opposition to full funding. The reasons for not fully funding the initiative were primarily political however they were also based on evidence from a substantial study. I love the idea of place based initiatives and have had success at certain levels in the implementation of these however think that for these to be success old assumptions need to be questioned and the vision needs to be substantially greater than what we’re seeing these days.
BY Elwood M. Hopkins
ON December 8, 2014 11:33 AM
Thank you for reading the piece, Regina! My friend Bob Ross, who heads the California Endowment, likes to refer to the need to pursue local initiatives and policy agendas at the same time as working from “Grassroots to Treetops.” He has actually rebuilt the foundation with a bifurcated structure that operates place-based initiatives in fourteen communities while advancing supportive policy development at the statewide level.
BY Elwood M. Hopkins
ON December 8, 2014 11:37 AM
Thank you Kirk—you raise an excellent point. It can be argued, as Peter Dreier at Occidental does, that concentrated poverty is linked the emergence of concentrated wealth. And that “poor ghettos” are the flip side of “rich ghettos.” I think some of the really cutting edge work in this field is focused not so much on improving the conditions of low-income communities—which is important—but on the creation of mixed income communities. If you don’t know it already, you might take a look at the work being done by Mark Joseph, who runs the National Initiative on Mixed Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University. He and his team are really onto something.
Thanks again!
BY Elwood M. Hopkins
ON December 8, 2014 11:44 AM
Paul— Thank you for sharing your Community Solutions Assessment. It has been so hard for the field to develop instruments that strike the right balance between neighborhood data profiles and needs assessments on one hand, and guidelines for action on the other. What I like about this is that it synthesizes the information into clear trends that practitioners can respond to. And it helps shape a narrative about where the community is going that residents and local leaders (as well as other staekholders) can participate in.
Can you say a bit more about your organization and how this instrument is used? I’d be grateful, and I think others would, too.
BY Elwood M. Hopkins
ON December 8, 2014 11:56 AM
Steven,
What an incredibly thoughtful, insightful response. It’s easy for people in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors to get so caught up in the language of strategy and social engineering that the heart/mind connection gets forgotten. And in the end, the real root source of change is that spiritual focus—and mental shifts in perception.
One of the very few people I know who knows how to integrate this awareness into real world community development strategies is my friend and colleague Rich Harwood at the Harwood Institute. He has his arms around what it means to understand and support positive attitudes at the individual and community level, and his “Community Rhythms methodology” puts structure on the development of a community’s narrative about itself. If you don’t know his work, I think you might really appreciate it. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Thank you!
BY Elwood M. Hopkins
ON December 8, 2014 12:18 PM
Lee,
I actually agree with every one of your points.
Over the last week, I organized an event called “Prioritizing Place: A National Forum on Place-Based Initiatives” at the USC Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy. We had leaders who have dedicated their lives to place-based work reflecting on the last fifty years, and one of the key reflections was that the concept of “resident engagement” has seldom been elevated to the level of genuine political involvement. It is crucial for the reasons you mention as well as for the potential to create broader constituencies for change across many low-income neighborhoods—a scale of organizing that could create meaningful policy change.
Also I agree with you that there is often a bias for funding services to the poorest of the poor at the expense of others who might benefit more quickly from support. In an environment where social service funding is perceived to be limited, foundations and nonprofits tend to focus it to those in greatest need—which is both understandable and justifiable. One positive result of this that I have started to observe however, is that some some social service strategies have been designed that achieve scale by differentiating between client needs. In a given community, for example, a large service agency can provide professional case management or medical interventions to those who have the most acute needs, while networks of paraprofessional promotaras or popular educators reach out to those who need lighter forms of support.
Another critique that I believe could also be made is that the nonprofit sector sometimes looks to social services as a solution where it is not always needed. This is not to say that social services do not play a crucial function but that sometimes when we have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Finally, your critique of the limitations of scale in place-based initiatives is also well taken. PolicyLink, which helped distill the Harlem Children’s Zone model for replication by DOE, did an excellent job of designing a process that could achieve some scale. But as you point out, limited political will led to a limited number of sites. Part of the future of this field is the need to get beyond top-down replication of place-based initiatives from national foundations and federal agencies. If we are ever going to observe responses at a scale commensurate with the scale of the problem, we will need more decentralized approaches that grow organically and mobilize local resources.
Thank you for your great response!
BY Steven Crandell
ON December 8, 2014 02:46 PM
Elwood, first please forgive me for spelling your name wrong in my first comment.
Second, thank you for your thorough and informative responses to all of us who were moved to comment on your piece. I will definitely try to find out more about Rich Harwood’s work. Sounds wonderful.
I also wanted to share a piece I just posted about how the mindset of people can make a difference. It’s called “Room at the Inn.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-crandell/room-at-the-inn_b_6278506.html?utm_hp_ref=third-metric
And since your consultancy works with banks on financial inclusion issues, I thought you might be interested in this donor guide I wrote with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors for the GAFIS project http://gafis.net/financial-inclusion-guide-rpa-gafis/
All best to you and your colleagues.
BY Paul Penley
ON December 9, 2014 10:54 AM
Elwood -
Thanks for the feedback on our Community Solutions Assessment! Shaping a simple narrative so people know where the community is going and how to participate is a tall task, and we hope our report makes it possible in each community where foundations sponsor it.
At Excellence in Giving, we function as a shared family foundation office for about 20 high-capacity givers across the country. For 12 years we have refined our methods for sharpening each foundation’s focus and executing grant strategies whose results years later bring great joy to all involved. We designed the Community Solutions Assessment to bridge the gap between needs our clients observe in their community and smart giving choices they could make to drive improvement. Needs assessments and profiles describe the problem but provide no wisdom about promising or proven solutions! Since we know a few well-crafted grants won’t move the needle, we created a community report rooted in qualitative and quantitative research but easily readable by all stakeholders. The goal is both to inform a foundation’s local giving while also providing a community narrative to direct local government policy, local volunteers, nonprofit programs, and other significant givers and groups.
I did my first community assessment in Knoxville, TN in 1999 for what would become the Compassion Coalition of Knoxville (http://www.compassioncoalition.org). The guidebook we produced would have had little impact, but the years spent training people/organizations and directing activities in light of the research has made a difference. We know in some communities our narrative will not be adopted, owned and updated, but we do interview 50+ community leaders along the way and have those interested review it before the final report. For the new Glynn County Georgia Assessment (http://issuu.com/excellenceingiving/docs/glynn_county_community_solutions_pr), the family foundation is deciding how to structure their local grant making right now in light of the assessment and part of what they might do is ask us to educate more givers and leaders in the community with our findings. We hope it does rally not only the foundation that sponsored it but also more community members who want to fuel positive momentum and change the direction of other negative community trends with promising or proven solutions we identified. We hope to launch a couple more Community Solution Assessments with private or community foundations this year.
BY Alexander McHugh
ON December 11, 2014 05:48 PM
Intriguing article. I think most successful place-based initiatives are organic in nature. The problem is that the changes prescribed for such initiatives are often conceived in far away boardrooms by people who have little connection to the communities they intend to help. Perhaps the biggest boondoggle of this type was Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages which actually distributed a 147 page guidebook written by academics, detailing how rural villages in Africa could escape from poverty. If the villagers simply followed the guidebook, they were told, they would leave the ranks of the poor within 5 years. (It goes without saying that the Millennium Villages didn’t pan out exactly as Mr. Sachs’ had hoped.) Compare that to the Orangi Pilot Project, in which a large squatter community in Karachi designed, financed, and built their own sanitation system. Better examples of successful place-based initiatives can be found all over the world where newcomers - be they internal migrants or immigrants - revitalize once derelict neighborhoods, rehabilitate housing stock, open businesses, and turn lemons into lemonade. poorpeopleblog.com
BY Valencia Joshua
ON December 23, 2014 01:44 AM
place-based poverty alleviating strategies certainly have a place in the overall fight against poverty. to people in the community these initiatives really work
BY Lee Reagan
ON December 23, 2014 07:23 AM
A related study from LISC that you may want to read about.
http://www.lisc.org/content/publication/detail/22089
New LISC study: investments in poor communities show results
Date Published: 12/11/2014
BY Lee Reagan
ON December 27, 2014 02:59 PM
something else to consider is the integration of technology in place based development. The idea of smart cities is upon us and it will definitely be take advantage for and by the communities with the most resources at first. What if place based initiatives took the initiative and attempted to make lower income communities leaders in this area. I can only imagine the algorithms that would be designed.Here’s a good article http://qz.com/312879#1/the-plans-for-how-smart-cities-will-predict-the-future/
BY Lee Reagan
ON December 27, 2014 02:59 PM
something else to consider is the integration of technology in place based development. The idea of smart cities is upon us and it will definitely be take advantage for and by the communities with the most resources at first. What if place based initiatives took the initiative and attempted to make lower income communities leaders in this area. I can only imagine the algorithms that would be designed.Here’s a good article http://qz.com/312879#1/the-plans-for-how-smart-cities-will-predict-the-future/