As a follow-up to Bruce Shoemaker's e-mail of January 7, 2003, I wanted to clarify several points about LISC's approach to the work of community development. I had a good opportunity to sit down and talk with Bruce and Kevin Reich of the Holland Neighborhood Improvement Association late last week. We had a very direct and productive conversation about a range of tough issues facing not only the Northeast community, but many neighborhoods throughout the city.
In his e-mail, Bruce raised a number of core questions about the formation of a new community development corporation (CDC) in Northeast Minneapolis and LISC's approach to community development, in general. These questions centered on the organizing role of CDCs vis-a-vis area neighborhood organizations, the appropriate size, scale and model for development entities in general, issues of competition for development opportunities, and the appropriateness and timing of city funding for the commercial corridor program along Central Avenue. As I noted above, we had a good conversation about all of these issues, but I wanted to clarify a few key points: First, LISC highly values the role of neighborhoods and communities in the development arena. It is at the heart of our mission and is essential to good community development work, in our opinion. Part of the tension that often exists between CDCs and neighborhood groups, from our perspective, lies in the constant battle of finding the right mechanisms for meaningful community input and the right balance between community process and a nimble, aggressive community-driven development organization. This has been particularly tricky in the Twin Cities where community organizing functions have often been disconnected from community development processes and are underfunded in many ways. Second, we view competition as a good thing. There can be no question that the private market has returned to many of our core city neighborhoods. Private developers are active in most of our neighborhoods and often have access to development opportunities on an equal if not more favorable basis than nonprofit developers do. Indeed, we view the community development environment in Minneapolis as one that favors private developers-perhaps appropriately so. Given the value we place on community-driven development, we've found ourselves more often battling to keep CDCs, nonprofit developers and neighborhoods at the development table than anything else. Third, LISC has a long track record of being open to, and supporting, many different "models" of community based development. We have invested millions of dollars over the years in a range of community development models, including neighborhood organization/CDC partnerships, partnerships among multiple organizations in a neighborhood, cross-neighborhood partnerships, as well as single purpose and/or comprehensive CDC models. We have always believed that community development work can take many forms and still produce good results. Bruce's point about LISC favoring broader, cross-neighborhood CDCs or models is somewhat correct. Unfortunately, over the past few years, we have become increasingly convinced that the funding environment, the development system and policymakers are less and less supportive of a widely scattered, smaller scale approach where individual neighborhoods have their own development capacity. This has been a painful realization for us here at LISC, one of the few organizations that has invested substantial sums in building neighborhood based development capacity. The challenge now is to figure out how to maximize community voice and input while also seeking out efficiency in production and implementation capacity. Fourth and finally, in terms of the appropriateness and timing of the city's support for the commercial corridor work along Central Ave. and West Broadway, we obviously feel this is a good investment. LISC's current fast track request is a reflection of the fact that LISC has, on good faith, carried the full costs of Year 3 of this program, including the city's portion of the funding for this program, which actually began in the Spring of 2002. The city initially made a four-year commitment to this program back in 2000, supporting a funding partnership between the city and LISC in which LISC raises private funding to match, dollar-for-dollar, the city's funding- a pretty good deal from our perspective. Unfortunately, our annual city funding for this program was caught up in the 2002 HRA Levy discussion which, after several twists and turns, has been approved but pushed into the current year. In the meantime, LISC has kept the corridors running by making $96,000 in grants that should have been covered by the city. Given our own scarce grant dollars, we are unable to continue this. As they have since the middle of last year, city staff is recommending that the Year 3 funding, and the funding for Year 4 (which begins in Spring, 2003) come out of the 2002 HRA Levy. This action will be considered by the City Council in late January. There are many tough issues facing neighborhoods across the city in these times of constrained resources. I believe that we here at LISC have been investing our own scarce resources in ways that meet several critical shared community goals, including the creation of vibrant commercial corridors along two of the cities top four priority corridors: Central Ave. and West Broadway. I appreciate the time Bruce and Kevin took to talk with us about their concerns and hope this brief response helps readers of the Issues Forum understand just a bit more about our approach. I'd be happy to sit down with anyone else to continue the discussion. I can be reached at (651) 265-2297. _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
