CDCs

As some cities begin to admit they are shrinking, CDCs in high-abandonment neighborhoods are rethinking their traditional roles, and even their missions.

Investors have played, and will continue to play, an important role in foreclosure-ravaged communities. What can towns do to ensure investors are responsible, and what role can CDCs play?

We expect the “solutions” to social problems to be found within the community, and yet community groups, more often than not, work beyond their communities’ boundaries. Why? Because they see the reality that if social and economic justice are to be realized in a community, then changes that are larger than the community must take place.

The nonprofit housing development field has myriad intermediaries and support organizations, but no one unified voice. Should it have one?

Today’s economic crisis is devastating neighborhoods and households across the country. Urban, low-income communities that were slowly recovering from the disinvestment of earlier decades are now falling back to where they were in the 1970s. Rural communities, walloped by the collapse of key economic generators, have suffered no less. Families that had begun to break the cycle of poverty and build small amounts of savings are now being plunged back into debt. Yet, at a time when the work of community development corporations is more needed than ever, there are growing questions about their long-term viability and efficacy.

We must define the community development field in terms of impact and organizational structure and look at CDCs as facilitators of development, not just developers.

This time of economic uncertainty presents an opportunity for the community development movement to reinvent itself.

From IDAs to comprehensive community wealth building, the number of strategies to increase personal and collective assets is growing.

Building sustainable coalitions is an important element to strengthening community-based development organizations (CBDOs) and increasing their influence on local and state policies. To accomplish that, coalitions benefit from favorable political […]

Some groups move in the opposite direction from Nobel Neighbors, starting out with a development focus and adding in organizing for the same reasons Nobel is adding development – visibility, […]

The second week of October 2001 was a busy one for Nobel Neighbors, a community organizing group in Chicago’s West Humboldt Park neighborhood. It organized 30 residents to attend a […]

For 12 years the building at 151 Chapman Street (above) stood vacant on a prominent corner, a menacing landmark that attracted squatters and generated no taxes for the hard-pressed city […]