Community Development Field

To get beyond superficial input, involve residents in a development from start to finish, from planning to implementation to ownership.

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?

When and how can consensus decision making work for community-based organizations?

Community development and planning organizations with a voting membership are rare, but the ones that do prioritize a democratic structure say it’s well worth the additional work.

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 […]

It used to be that the idea of one nonprofit taking over another was simply anathema.  Nonprofits didn’t, you know, do that to one another. Mergers and acquisitions were the territory of national banks, energy companies and pharmaceutical giants with oversized ambitions and possibly malevolent intent. Nonprofits weren’t motivated by “creating efficiencies,” particularly at the […]

AmeriCorps turned 20 on September 12th. To celebrate, the agency had an immensely successful Thunderclap campaign that reached over 51 million people on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. It was the 4th most popular Thunderclap campaign so far. Now I’m an old dog still learning new social media tricks so I didn’t know what a Thunderclap […]

(with Sheryl Verlaine Whitney)  If there was one phrase heard more than any other during our work at HUD, it was “All hands on deck.” (Actually, it was second only to “Are you kidding me?”). In virtually every situation, whether it was implementing programs in response to the housing crisis, getting Recovery Act funds allocated […]

Over the past few weeks, many news accounts have laid bare questionable—and perhaps criminal—police behavior and the subsequent and continuing protests by concerned citizens in and around Ferguson, Mo. On a single day, September 10th, at least three protests happened—one at the state capitol, one outside St. Louis City Hall, and one near Ferguson (a thwarted highway sit-in […]

Domestic social impact investment is stuck. Each year a few deals trickle through, but despite the potential and promise, impact investments in the United States are rare, complex, and entirely […]

Richmond’s creation of the nation’s first Office of Community Wealth Building marks a reimagining of community economic development policy.