Insights on Community Power Building and Community Development
What is necessary to advance community power building and community development? We’ve found six thematic lessons emerging from our work in California.
The first three themes speak to the community development and investment challenges that surfaced across Ground Works Consulting’s California projects. The last three themes highlight strengths we collectively can use to propel powerful work in 2023 and beyond.
Challenges to Confront
1. Outside of coastal California, community and economic development, ecosystems are thwarted by a lack of access to philanthropic and capital partners.
Without strong philanthropic and capital partners, inland and northern California regions lack access to money, space to collectively plan, and the organizational infrastructure necessary to implement their community development visions.
2. Underinvestment in community-based organizations, led by BIPOC and low-income people, has stymied efforts to advance transformative projects across the state.
Leaders of emerging community-based development initiatives across the state, often led by Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), struggle to find accessible investment capital. These same leaders often utilize their own money or underpay themselves to get these initiatives off the ground. Communities need healthy institutions positioned to organize residents, advocate for better policies and meaningful resources, and steward their collective visions to fruition.
3. The conventional community investment toolbox isn’t meeting the diversity of California’s community development needs.
Community leaders struggle to find financial partners, products, or services for a range of development projects. Current community investment tools are not meeting the long-term or most urgent needs of the communities they serve. Building a bigger community investment toolbox and strategically locating those tools closer to community leaders across the state opens doors for local leaders to work at a pace and scale that begins to address the state’s most urgent needs.
Strengths to Build On
1. Grassroots advocates are bringing new attention, energy, and innovation to development strategies that guide California’s future.
California’s failure to grapple with economic and racial segregation, combined with the massive housing and climate crises, has led BIPOC, low-income, and frontline communities to use powerful advocacy strategies to draw attention to the impacts of inequitable development, secure millions of dollars in public resources, change policy, and create new community and economic development needs.
2. Strengthening power-building practices has positive implications for community development and economic development fields as a whole.
Drawing inspiration from grassroots movements representing working-class communities and communities of color, organizers have secured substantive and strategic wins that have both changed the policy landscape and brought millions of dollars to advance equitable development strategies across California. See the report for examples of what this work looks like on the ground.
3. New public and private resources create an opening to advance equitable and sustainable development at a meaningful scale.
There are new experimental modes of funding that could potentially advance racial and economic justice. Programs like the Community Economic Resilience Fund (CERF), the Foreclosure Intervention Housing Preservation Program (FIHPP), and several climate initiatives are being designed, implemented, and rolled out in ways that will allow community-based organizations more authority over how public resources are spent. Tracking these state-level experiments will be critical to understanding how to move public resources to community-based organizations most effectively.
Check out our publication From the Ground Up Field Notes: Lessons from 2020-2022 for more!