Let’s Talk About Jobs—And Ownership
Community economic development is not just a matter of helping some households to get jobs and pay their bills. Done thoughtfully, it’s about . . .
Interview With Tom Szaky, Founder, Terracycle
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.
On Board
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?
Bonus: Diversifying the Public Sector
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 […]
How to Respond When Someone Screams “But We’ll Get Sued!”
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 […]
Ferguson on My Mind
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 […]
Keeping Justice in Mind as We Talk Asset-Building
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 […]
Government Works Badly–If We Refuse to Invest in It
At the Bipartisan Policy Center's Housing Summit earlier this week, Shelterforce got to interview former HUD secretaries Mel Martinez and Henry Cisneros (we'll publish that interview here next week). One of the questions we asked was how to handle the fact that the American electorate often seems to have a bias, not so much against […]
Regions Can’t Live By Oxygen Alone
Jack Jensen, an affordable housing and green builder in Ithaca, N.Y., is grumpy about Smart Growth. Specifically, he's pissed off at the assumption that urban infill preserves green space. As […]
Income for Everyone?
If you wanted to come up with a totally cockamamie idea to attribute to someone to smear them as unrealistic bleeding-heart socialist, what would you come up with? Possibly “the […]
The Dangerous Rhetoric of Escaping to Opportunity
At the Philly Federal Reserve conference last spring, in the “Future of CDCs“ discussion our own Harold Simon moderated, Joe Kriesberg, director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, […]
So About that Deconcentrating Poverty Thing…
Land of Opportunity Interactive has a marvelous interactive video (click here for description of what that means) called “Bricks and Sticks: Public vs. Private“ that uses footage from New Orleans to force […]