Tag: CDCs

New research shows that smaller community-based development organizations in particular are hanging on but facing financial challenges.

Some CDCs hope that building trust can save lives now while building a stronger foundation for long-term health. “COVID is a catalyst forcing us to think outside the box, to pivot, to explore our partnerships in different ways.”

Increasingly, health practitioners are being hired by community development organizations, and vice versa. What can they tell us about how differently the sectors operate and perceive issues, and where there’s potential for partnership?

While rent relief might not be their mission, organizations are focusing on the immediate needs of residents. But with all of their staff and monetary resources being used to plug holes, some organizations believe they’re a few months or another crisis away from financial disaster.

Peter Madden does asset management for a portfolio of around 2,200 units of primarily low-income, subsidized housing across New York City. And yes, most...

As organizers struggle to get strong eviction moratoriums passed and enforced around the country, there’s one sector where evictions during the pandemic were not...

CDCs and their support organizations consider what it takes to weather the recession—from business model changes to different funding streams to mergers.

Starting in the mid 1970s, Mel King and other visionary leaders of the community development movement worked systematically to build a support infrastructure for...

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.

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.

Photo Courtesy of HANDS Inc. For 12 years the building at 151 Chapman Street (above) stood vacant on a prominent corner, a menacing landmark that...

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...

Some groups move in the opposite direction from Nobel Neighbors, starting out with a development focus and adding in organizing for the same reasons...

In exchange for the abandonment of meaningful levels of housing assistance—whether project- or tenant-based—we are paying a high price in homelessness and severe cost burdens.

One hundred issues and 23 years ago, a group of tenant activists, community organizers, and legal aid attorneys came together to begin a new...