Tag: community engagement

Three Ways AFFH Has Advanced Housing Justice

Grassroots organizers have used the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule to strengthen communities in the past. These examples show what we should advocate for in a new AFFH rule. 

From an Abandoned Mall to Bustling Community Hub

A medical complex in Mississippi draws on local artists to go beyond doctors' offices and become a gathering place for those living nearby.

Contracting with the Community

To connect with hard-to-reach communities, a Twin Cities agency diverted some of its consulting budget away from national firms and to organizations that already had those relationships.

What’s Different When the Community Collects the Data?

When residents were recruited to conduct an annual study that examines community change and health in nine Massachusetts communities, they didn't just collect data—they changed how and what was collected.

Send In the Resident Ambassadors

Neighborhoods B.U.I.L.D. Dayton is a community lawyering project of Legal Aid of Western Ohio Inc. and Advocates for Basic Legal Equality Inc. (B.U.I.L.D. stands...

More Than a Mural: How Arts and Culture Advance the Mission...

Arts programs at one public housing development in Seattle have eased the challenges of redevelopment by helping residents define what the community means to them.

Paying Community Members for Their Time

Community development organizations are recognizing that community expertise is valuable and that residents should be compensated for it.

Community Engagement Can’t Be a Checklist

Are we engaging communities meaningfully, or are we just checking off boxes?

An Artist’s Way of Seeing: Community Engagement in Creative Placemaking

How are artists converting the power and creativity of art into community-led change?

It’s Not Actually About Ownership

Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia, by Debbie Becher. Oxford University Press, 2014. 334pp. $30.50 (paper) Purchase here.

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...

Phillip Henderson, President, Surdna Foundation

Phillip Henderson was only 38 when he took the helm at the Surdna Foundation seven years ago, becoming Surdna’s second director in what he calls its “modern era.” Henderson came to the family foundation from a career that had been focused on international philanthropy, but he applied many of the lessons he learned fostering civic engagement in post-Communist Europe to Surdna’s domestic grantmaking. Henderson sat down with Shelterforce to talk about aligning program with mission, cross-pollination between programs, and Surdna’s recent launch into the impact investing world.

Mission: Accomplished

For the past five years, I have been involved with a project in Eastern Oregon in a town with a population of 3,310. The...