In Praise of Faith-Based Community Organizing
Government has frequently turned to the voluntary religious sector to provide social services. The question is how and why it’s done: to entice religious conversion, impose sectarian values, to win conservative votes? Or to meet human needs?
Getting Competitive Health Care Systems to Work Together For the Community
Although they were serving the same communities, Philadelphia’s nonprofit hospitals weren’t coordinating with each other. A yearslong process aimed to change that. How did the hospitals eventually come together and what lessons can be drawn to inform hospital collaborations elsewhere?
Fair Housing at 50: At the Root, It’s Still Race Over Place
We should have known better. The Kerner Commission taught us that race matters most, not place. But it also embedded in our psyches the equation of Black = central city and the similarly absolute equation of white = suburbs.
Residents of Nonprofit Housing Have Lower Rates of COVID
Affordable housing providers have touted the connections between health and the places where people live for years. In a small city outside of Boston, the evidence is incontrovertible.
Skipping “Placed-Based” Work Leaves Cities Vulnerable to Climate Change
I remember it clearly. “The Myth of Community Development,” Nicholas Lemann’s 1994 New York Times Magazine article, cracked the foundation of the community development industry. He argued that no...
What’s the Matter With Newark?
For the community economic development organizations that have spent decades trying to keep Newark's neighborhoods afloat, the promise of a new mayor has only managed to throw the city's paradoxes into sharper relief.