This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
In a scene from “Rebuilding the Dream,” a PBS documentary about the attempt to rebuild one of St. Louis’s historically under-resourced communities, the camera cuts from a close-up of the facade of Barack Obama Elementary school to the school hallway.
You see someone hugging and greeting students, walking the halls. Now she’s talking to a mom who’s just lost her housing and ended up in a shelter.
“We’re going to help,” she says kindly. “You just want some normalcy in your life.” The scene cuts—she’s handing a little boy some cereal, a box of milk. Now she’s handing him some new socks; he’s trying on a new pair of shoes. She feels the toe—“That too big? He’s got a little room, he’ll be fine.”
This person is not a school employee. She works for a local community development organization called Beyond Housing.
When people think of community development organizations, they often think of affordable housing. It’s a central component to building healthy neighborhoods, to be certain, but in an attempt to strengthen the communities they work in, some community development organizations have chosen to prioritize education as part of their strategy.
Purpose Built Communities is a network of place-based community development organizations that center education in their work. Vicky Sistrunk, former vice president of marketing and communications with Purpose Built Communities explained why in an email: “Our model is focused on building the conditions for a community to be healthy and thriving long-term. Affordable, high-quality, and safe housing gives a family the stability to focus on their child’s education and other elements of family life because that basic need is addressed. A strong school allows families to build deeper roots in the community because they want to stay for an extended time.”
A growing body of research supports these claims. Substandard housing and poor neighborhood conditions are linked to low levels of kindergarten readiness to read. Overcrowding, homelessness, frequent moves, and evictions also affect educational outcomes. And access to good schools affects how much families will pay for housing and how likely they are to move.
Not only can good schools encourage families to stay, they encourage others to move in, which should build a tax base that could support further school improvement. But for a school to be strong, it needs resources—ones that schools in low-income areas often lack.
Using Schools to Connect Families to Services
Northside Development Group in Spartanburg, South Carolina—in the state’s northwest—is a member of the Purpose Built Community network. Spartanburg was once a mill town: when the mill closed in 2001, there was “a vacuum in the neighborhood,” according to Michael Williamson, the CEO of the Northside Development Group (NDG). By the time the Northside Development Group was formed in 2011, about 50 percent of the homes in the “Northside”—a rectangular, 400-acre stretch of land on the northwest side of the city—had become vacant.
So Northside Development Group started having conversations with school administrators to assess what the needs were.
“Every year, we’d sit down with the principal and say, ‘what do you need to be more successful in your work?’ And he would give us a list of things that he needed,” Williamson says. NDG funded student growth opportunities like field trips and incentives for high grades. It provided funds for the school to hire math and reading interventionists to help struggling students. It also participated in a salary matching program for nine AmeriCorps hires.
As the relationship deepened, it eventually became clear that it was time to scale up. NDG decided to hire staff to enter schools as family “navigators,” who help the families of students referred by school administration to access resources ranging from immediate needs like food, housing, and employment, to longer term resources like financial literacy, educational opportunities for parents, and programs to support families in becoming homeowners.
And these programs have helped stabilize the schools.
“Last year, the school received an ‘excellent’ report card rating for the first time in the school’s history, the highest rating that you can receive, and a lot of that was based on the growth of student achievement at the school,” Williamson says.
But families face many pressures—it’s a high poverty area, and even with support, families have few resources to help their children. Williamson says NDG is working to quantify how their investment in housing and schools affects the neighborhoods they serve.
For community development organizations, providing school-based staff who do this kind of work is a common way to coordinate with and support the schools.
To the north of St. Louis, Missouri, sit 24 separate municipalities served by one school district—the Normandy Schools Collaborative. Beyond Housing, a local community development organization, has been operating in the area since 2009. It provides several housing-related services: renovating and renting affordable housing and commercial properties, providing grants to homeowners for repair, homebuyer education and downpayment assistance for first-time buyers.
In 2008, it had started conversations with local political leaders and community members about how it could participate in addressing the challenges resulting from disinvestment in the community. From these conversations came the “24:1 Community,” a revitalization plan that brought the 24 municipalities together. Since they were already working under a model that stressed investment not just in housing, but also the many other needs families had, Beyond Housing already had staff in schools.
Their “family engagement liaisons,” similar to Northside Development Group’s “navigators,” are embedded in each school—elementary to high school. These liaisons are an available resource to any student, but with the consultation of staff and faculty, they usually identify families that have acute need that they provide support to. Support can come in many forms—a new pair of shoes, food, school supplies, a pathway to affordable housing, or emotional support for children and caregivers who have experienced trauma.
“They’re very committed to solutions,” says Jaclyn Belt, chief transformation officer of Beyond Housing, “and they go above and beyond to meet a family’s needs.” For example, a family engagement liaison may make a call to a local shelter, or find other ways to support a family through the family’s church. “Honestly, they just don’t quit until a solution is found.”
For high school seniors, Beyond Housing offers a range of career- and college-readiness services: help opening bank accounts, navigating FAFSA and other forms, support for academic testing, college visits, career exploration support, financial literacy advising, and a program that offers 3-to-1 matching funds for graduating seniors’ own college savings, up to $1,500.
Belt hopes that Beyond Housing’s investment in Normandy schools will help break the cycle of poor schools leading to low commitment to neighborhoods leading to lack of resources for schools.
Belt made the point that many families have school-aged children, and so if a comprehensive community development organization is looking for a strategic partner to help families, a school district makes sense, because it’s a way to identify and help families who are in crisis and might need additional support.
Not Specialists
The East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC) has been involved in nonprofit housing development since the 1970s. It started with commercial property in Oakland’s Chinatown. In the ’90s, it became involved in the Havenscourt neighborhood of East Oakland—there was an affordable housing building with a high percentage of Asian American/Pacific Islander residents in the neighborhood that was poorly maintained and needed renovation.
But EBALDC has long recognized that housing isn’t enough. “A neighborhood can’t be healthy if it doesn’t have factors that support healthy community life,” says Ener Chiu, the organization’s executive vice president. “Also needed is access to clean environment, water, safety, food, good schools, transit, economic opportunities.”
The group got involved in the school district in a very measured way at first: since the streets could be dangerous, they had staff walking students home from aftercare programs at the school. It started helping run an after-school program that the local elementary school was facilitating; eventually, the school outsourced the program to EBALDC entirely, which moved it into the housing complex it manages.
Though the program is beloved by families, Chiu says many of its strengths come with related challenges.
“Part of what makes our youth programs so successful and impactful is the deep relationship that our small staff builds with not only the students, but also their families . . . because they live within a block of the after school program and are residents of the apartments above and around,” Chiu wrote in an email. Such relationships “are simply not scalable.”
Chiu added that the program itself is also “highly specific to the Lion Creek Crossings community, and we would not be able to do the same program at another building in the same way.” This also prevents scaling up the way a dedicated after-school group—which could make use of standardized practices for hiring teachers and curriculum development—could do.
Chiu describes the holistic model as “deep, but not very broad.” It provides comprehensive care—free for residents, in the building, with a full curriculum and programming, and mental health services—but can do that for at most 30 to 40 kids a year.
“What made it so powerful for a while,” said Chiu, “is that we had service programming for families with kids from essentially zero until they graduated.”
But comprehensive programs like this, according to Chiu, can be hard to finance. Recently, EBALDC has had to cut back some of its programming due to issues with financing. “We have a little hole in there right now for one particular age group between 3rd and 5th grade,” he says.
Community development groups typically fund education programs from several small pots of money—usually a combination of state grants, modest funding from school districts, rents from their properties, and private funding. State grants tend to have two- or three-year limits, so pose challenges for stability in programming. The income from rental properties has shrunk in recent years as well, largely due to the pressures placed on families from COVID.
“Organizations like ours that are affordable housing developers and operators are landlords and rent is part of our operating model,” Chiu says.
And private funding is piecemeal, and sometimes difficult to access, partially because the after-school programs don’t have larger-scale footprint.
Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, CEO of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), identified similar funding challenges.
Based on the south side of Boston, IBA, whose name means Puerto Rican Tenants in Action, was founded as a grassroots movement in 1968 by Puerto Rican activists fighting to stop the city of Boston from displacing them. They won the right to develop the parcel of land they fought for. Today, IBA has 667 affordable rental units on that land, and a variety of programs for residents. The resulting neighborhood is called Villa Victoria—Victory Village.
“Community development means that that you take the whole family and the whole community and you think about, how can we expand access to all the things that are going to be critical for these families to succeed,” says Calderón-Rosado, “that’s why IBA has been in the education field for so long.”
The organization runs a bilingual early education program and an English language learner program at an elementary school in the neighborhood. And it partnered with Boston Public Schools to found the first public bilingual high school in Massachusetts. IBA was initially looking for a way to build that school in its own South End neighborhood, but there was no place that would accommodate something the size of a high school. It had to be built elsewhere, but students from the neighborhood do attend the high school.
Bilingual education is critical to IBA’s model.
“Research continues to show the positive impact of dual language education, especially early on in life,” Calderón-Rosado says. “It has so many benefits.” IBA runs an early education program in Villa Victoria primarily for residents, with space for families from other neighborhoods to apply as well. The program serves a combination of monolingual Spanish speakers, monolingual English speakers, and bilingual families.
“Our parents are multicultural,” she says. “We have families who are not Latino. We have African American, and white families, and Asian families. . . . What we hear from those parents who are not Latino or speak Spanish at home is that they want their children to be exposed to Spanish at an early age, precisely for all the benefits, and also because they want them to be in a place that is multicultural. And for the monolingual Spanish families, then they want the kids to build skills in English as well.”
Because of its bilingual focus, IBA also partnered with a local elementary school (“I can see it right from my window,” Calderón-Rosado said as we spoke) to run an English language learner program. But Calderón-Rosado said they recently had to sunset that program, and one of the several reasons was funding.
The Partnership Dance
Working with school districts, families, and funders means there are many stakeholders to consider and personalities to balance.
“The primary challenge is really the collaboration piece,” Belt from Beyond Housing says. “Because we are facilitating, we are supporting, we’re not leading or telling, there is a bit of a dance.”
Each administration has its own way of doing things, and each family engagement liaison has their own relationship with the school they’re embedded in. This means that positive working relationships between Beyond Housing’s staff and the school administrations are critical for the success of the programs.
IBA has partnered with Boston Public Schools many times—from setting up a bilingual pre-K program with the district to creating socially distanced in-person learning pods for low-income students in their community to support learning during the pandemic.
But working with a large school district comes with its own set of challenges.
“We’ve had many false starts,” Calderón-Rosado says, “It’s just so challenging because, between their own leadership transitions and internal challenges they may have, it’s very hard to get their attention to work alongside each other as partners.”
Despite the challenges, all the community development organizations we spoke to see their role in education as central to creating vibrant, stable, and prosperous communities.
“We know that communities with strong schools are strong communities,” Calderón-Rosado says.
“Our current mission is to create a stronger, more equitable and prosperous St. Louis once and for all,” Belt says. “Our work has to be a response to those things that led to disinvestment and generational poverty. And so really taking the onus off of the people in the community and really making sure … that we’re responding to the unequal distribution of affordable housing or gainful employment, high quality education, high quality health care, or accessibility to those things.”
And to serve the families, the groups stress the importance of understanding and partnering with the community.
Calderón-Rosado suggests that community development organizations who are interested in place-based strategies start by assessing needs. “Start talking about, what schools do they go to, and then perhaps start talking to those schools, right? And see how you could partner with them.”
Says Williamson of Northside Development Group, “I think when it comes to place-based initiatives, having a comprehensive approach and then finding partners who specialize in those fields to help you implement the work is important.”
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