Miriam Axel-Lute

In the film Gaining Ground, about the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a powerful community planning and organizing group in Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, one of the major story lines involves the Kroc Community Center. In a nutshell, the Salvation Army got a huge amount of money to build community centers around the country, and wanted […]

Last year, I wrote about the teeming conference of the Opportunity Finance Network, the trade group for community development financial institutions, with a little bit of awe at how different it was from the rest of the community development world in its growth and optimism, worrying about mission creep rather than survival. This year the […]

So folks, we need to have a chat about this whole “workforce housing” thing. It’s a problem. Or rather, the way it is often being used these days is a problem, which is as shorthand for housing for people who aren’t really low-income, but are still having trouble affording housing in a hot market.

At the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Housing Summit on Sept. 15 and 16, five former HUD secretaries joined a panel discussing their time at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. […]

Local procurement policies take money already being spent and direct it to local businesses to get more economic development benefit for the buck.

Community economic development is not just a matter of helping some households to get jobs and pay their bills. Done thoughtfully, it’s about . . .

We spoke with Tom Szaky, TerraCycle’s founder and CEO, about social enterprise, locating in a distressed community, and what he as an employer would want out of workforce development programs.

How do you make a community development organization’s board welcoming to residents and low-income members, and ensure that once there, they are more than window dressing?

This is a sidebar to “On Board,” an article about making a community development organization’s board welcoming to residents and low-income members. CDC boards can be a first stop for […]

There are not a ton of things I read on the Internet that instantly make me want to hunt down the author and send him or her flowers. But Charles Marohn's post “On Liability“ on the Strong Towns blog was definitely one of them. “Liability” is increasingly sucking the joy out of life. Everywhere you […]

Outside my house, two young African-American boys, maybe 9 or 10, scoot by on skateboards. One is carrying something on a leaf and stops to show me a giant slug. We chat about it a bit; I tell him that I looked up what kind of slug that was recently but now don’t remember. He […]

I attended my first ever Assets Learning Conference, put on by CFED last week, and I have to say it was mighty impressive. And I was particularly pleased to see that economic justice and things like reforming the tax code to be less regressive and reward savings by low- and middle-income Americans, rather than mostly […]