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Topics: Religion

Base Communities
Citizen Action at the Grassroots

"Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots," is a study of religious "base communities" in Baltimore. Base Communities are small, intimate peer groups of a dozen or two dozen people, in which participants can evaluate the day's struggles, commiserate with one another's failures, celebrate success, and plan for the next day's fight in larger public arenas. Excerpted from Harold A. McDougall's Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community. Case study plus.

Index

Case Study Plus: Base Communities: Citizen Action at the Grassroots
Case Study Plus: Community Building in Partnership

Contents

Case Study Plus: Community Building in Partnership

Sandtown as a Setting
The Nehemiah Project
Concept of Community-Building in Partnership
Notes

Community Building in Partnership

The only way the process of empowerment can continue is if new leadership continues to surface, not always to stand out in front, but also to fill in the gaps, to maintain communications and dialogue among all the people in the community.

-Darnell Ridgley

Baltimore's nonprofit housing providers have expended a tremendous amount of time, energy, and creativity in the effort to give Baltimore's low-income population access to decent housing, and an extensive system of networks is attempting to remedy the lack of low-income housing caused by racial and economic discrimination. The emphasis has been on bricks and mortar, however, and the development of the city's human resources has lagged behind. Thus, a number of houses in a particular neighborhood may be rehabilitated, but other factors that also affect the neighborhood's stability—crime, drugs, lack of employment, and a poor education system—remain unaddressed. Concern over such issues led to a drive by the mayor, BUILD, and the Enterprise Foundation to attempt a broad-based, comprehensive renovation of an entire neighborhood. Sandtown-Winchester was selected.

As the urban experts Neil Pierce and Curtis Johnson have observed, it is too early to celebrate the breakthroughs resulting from this "Community Building in Partnership" effort. What might be accomplished is really inspiring: "Local schools managed by the principals, teachers, and parents—not a central school bureaucracy. Tenant management teams to run public housing projects and develop citizenship centers. Enrichment centers to provide job training that might lead to middle-class futures." Community-oriented policing' "police officers placed on permanent neighborhood assignment to prevent crimes, not just search for criminals and pick up bodies," is also a possibility. And it all could be done with no more money than is funneled into Sandtown today for various forms of government largess—welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, and the like. [1]

A pivotal feature of the process remains the involvement of community residents, however, not just in the planning process, but also in the implementation. Too often planners completely disregard the question of how plans are to be put into practice, or who is to put them into practice. Too often implementation means getting the community's token support for a process that planners have initiated and will continue to control. Sandtown residents will, of course, benefit from the physical changes that are going on in their community, but they must be empowered in a much deeper way. Broad-based community involvement and comprehensive participation will be necessary to insure the accountability of the process in Sandtown, which businessmen, politicians, community leaders, social service bureaucrats, and private foundation staff are all struggling to control. [2]

Sandtown as a Setting

Sandtown is characterized by absentee landlords, housing abandonment, and arson. There is a great deal of dilapidated alley housing of the type inhabited by blacks in Baltimore for generations. Of the approximately forty-six hundred dwelling units in Sandtown, about 30 percent are multifamily dwellings, and just under 20 percent of the single-family homes are owner-occupied. Sixteen percent of the dwelling units in the neighborhood are subsidized. Overcrowding in Sandtown has decreased, the vacancy rate now standing at about 5 percent. Rents have increased by half during the last ten years. Homes for sale in the neighborhood have increased in price from roughly a tenth of the citywide mean to a quarter of it. The houses increased in value 117 percent in this period, compared with 158 per cent in Park Heights and 183 per cent for Baltimore as a whole. Unlike Park Heights, which is experiencing a great deal of new private mortgage capital investment, banks have not yet begun investing ~n Sandtown to any appreciable extent.

Because of its large number of multifamily units, abandoned buildings, and vacant lots, Sandtown is ripe for extensive development despite the reluctance of the private sector. The city Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) quietly acquired and cleared properties as part of a comprehensive strategy that made Sandtown a prime candidate for the Baltimore Nehemiah Project (described below) and brought in the massive infusion of capital needed. When Sandtown residents appealed to Mayor Schmoke for aid in reclaiming their neighborhood from drugs, crime, unemployment, and inadequate housing, he was ready.

Community resident Athena Young carried on a street survey of Sandtown, with my assistance, in the summer of 1991. Her impression was that her community was filled with a great many people trying to make it on their own—lots of beauty parlors, carryout restaurants, and auto repair shops being run out of yards and small buildings. In some cases, she observed, people would do better to move a block away, but because they have not done any market research, they are unaware of the competition until they actually set up shop. The diversity that we observed in our first assessment was amazing. Sometimes there were three churches in a block, from storefronts to the massive St. Peter Claver and the New Song Urban Ministry, newly moved into a renovated building across the street from Gilmor Homes. We passed evidence of Muslim and black nationalist activity: a Muslim carryout on Carey Street, the Nation Builders (2) bookstore on North Avenue, and the home of a Rastafarian, with a Haile Selassie emblem and handwritten, apocalyptic messages posted in his windows. On "black business row" on North Avenue across from the Nation Builders (2) bookstore, black street vendors who live in the area come out around lunchtime and stay until dusk. Arabbers (black vendors who sell fruit, vegetables, and fish from horse-drawn wagons in West Baltimore) gather on Winchester Street, at the stable of Sandtown's senior Arabber, whose street name is Fatback. There they collect their produce and merchandise to sell on the streets of Sandtown. Fatback's stable was later bulldozed to make way for the Nehemiah Project.

We passed a small house that appeared to be a Veterans of Foreign Wars post. We passed a fire station, a police station, a gas station, and several larger business sites, including a stationery manufacturer, a heating oil company, and a paving concern. We took note of three doctors, two lawyers, a dentist, a realtor, a tailor, a shoemaker, and two barber shops. There were a number of funeral homes, one dry cleaner, one hardware store, and two laundromats. There are three elementary schools, Gilmor, Kelson, and Pinderhughes (another elementary school and a high school in Sandtown have been closed and converted into apartments). The Lafayette Square Multipurpose Center, the Lillian Jones Recreational Center, the Urban Services Agency on Gilmor Street, the Carroll Health facility for the elderly (then under construction), and the Baltimore Project (prenatal counseling and referral) all are located in Sandtown. Evidence of the Nehemiah Project was clearly apparent, as well as some earlier renovations and rehabilitations. And, of course, there is Gilmor Homes, a low-rise public housing project occupying several square blocks and situated directly across from Gilmor Elementary School. This was our preliminary inventory of the resources of Sandtown. About two weeks later, at Young's practical suggestion, we checked our street observations with the telephone book. The white pages and the yellow pages corroborated most of our observations although the storefront churches generally could not be found in the telephone book. The Arabbers, of course, were not listed.

The Nehemiah Project

In 1988 over eight hundred BUILD delegates, Mayor Schmoke, Governor Schaeffer, Senators Mikulski and Sarbanes, Representative Mfume, and scores of religious and lay leaders gathered at St. Peter Claver Church in Sandtown to announce a collaboration among BUILD, the city, state, and federal governments, and the Enterprise Foundation. Mayor Schmoke committed $11 million in land, site clearance, and municipal services; Governor Schaefer promised $11 million in low-interest mortgage financing. The principal BUILD denominations and the city's Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, and Jewish organizations have together contributed $2.2 million in interest-free construction loan funds, to be made available for a term of seven years. In early 1989, the federal government pledged $4.2 million in Nehemiah Opportunity Grants to provide interest-free secondary mortgages of up to $15,000 each, to help reduce the size of the first mortgages homebuyers will need to purchase. Loan repayment will be deferred until the new owner leases, sells, or otherwise transfers the house.

The Enterprise Nehemiah Development Corporation (a subsidiary of the Enterprise Foundation) serves as project developer and is the recipient of BUILD construction loan funds. Its board of directors consists of three Enterprise Foundation representatives and three BUILD representatives. No action can be taken, no check can be signed, without the agreement of both groups. The $28 million Nehemiah Project will build 225 new, modular homes for low-income families in Sandtown, as well as rehabilitating 17 rowhouses. Seventy-five new modular homes are scheduled for Penn North, a community located just north of Sandtown. The overall plan calls for the elimination of seventy vacant dwellings and commercial and industrial units, and for the expansion of the commercial development of North Avenue (the northern border of the project area). In addition to the Nehemiah Project proper, the city has undertaken a major sanitation project, and the Gilmor Homes public housing project is being modernized with funds from the HUD Comprehensive Improvement Assistance Program (CIAP).

The Nehemiah Project in Sandtown is not limited to physical redevelopment' however. It includes a planning, service, and community action component, called "Community Building in Partnership" (CBIP). The CBIP concept is to approach community development holistically' involving community residents and seeking to evoke from them a commitment to a real change in their neighborhood.

The Concept of Community-Building in Partnership

The task force formally began the process in May 1990 with a public meeting in Sandtown, attended by some four hundred residents—every kind of community person. There was a free meal for all participants; no one was turned away. The participants, broken down into small groups, were urged to "think and dream about what you want." Darnell Ridgely, a big, fair-skinned black community advocate with fire-red hair and outrageous fingernails, was transferred by Mayor Schmoke from her job supervising the city's Community Development Block Grant program to staff the CBIP project. Ridgley, Francis Green (a consultant), and members of the CBIP Task Force facilitated meetings to be sure that the process remained open and community driven. At first, the community people did not believe them. They were waiting for the city staff, the Enterprise staff, the experts, to take care of things. The staff refused, and forced the people to deal with the issues.

"If you don't have a sense of what people really want, any physical or institutional changes made in a community will simply revert," Ridgley observed. Eight work groups along the lines of community concerns were formed, consisting of community members and staff from the city and the Enterprise Foundation. BUILD'S small staff made it impossible for it to match the activity of the city and Enterprise in this regard.

The Physical Dimension

Although Habitat International's philosophy is to encourage the development of owner-occupied, single-family housing, the CBIP task force recommended that homeownership also be promoted through cooperatives and mutual housing. "Cohousing," pioneered in Denmark, is the latest word in such cooperative living and construction arrangements. In a cohousing venture, each family (or individual) owns or rents its own dwelling unit within the community. The units are similarly designed, low-rise homes arranged in rows or clusters. Each unit has less living space than a conventional private home to reduce expense and encourage the use of larger structures that include a kitchen and dining area, where common meals are regularly served, as well as children's play areas, laundry facilities, and so on. The community is also surrounded by common outdoor areas, such as green spaces, courtyards, soccer fields, and gardens. Though parking is available, it is not adjacent to the units but rather kept just within walking distance, making the settlement safer and encouraging interaction.

The cohousing community is managed only by residents, who all participate in committees or work groups. Though most of the existing communities arose from groups of friends who simply decided to change the way they lived, many of the residents have found cooperative decision making very difficult. Some people whose ideals diverge from those of the group leave. Yet most of the people who choose to join in this effort bring with them a vision of community that enables them eventually to accept the validity and utility of group decision making. These people find themselves uplifted through the process of democratic participation. Once residents of cohousing communities have endured the difficult process of interaction and affiliation, they usually move in and stay. The key problem in developing cohousing in Baltimore would be integrating the cohousing units into the larger neighborhood. In Sandtown, the condominiums developed by the Housing Assistance Corporation and SWIA on Fulton Avenue were very insular. The homeowners' association that developed inside the condominiums was too detached from the community outside, and caused a good deal of resentment. The organizers of the Sandtown project want to avoid such results.

The Economic Dimension

Thus, CBIP shifts the focus of economic development away from "big bang," large-scale, remotely located projects, like the Inner Harbor, which may broaden the tax base and create jobs, but which do not generate benefits that can "trickle down" to working people and the poor. Without an economic network connecting the lower economic levels with the upper ones at which "big bang" development intervention occurs, "trickle down" cannot take place. A greater emphasis on networking and mentoring, and a determined attempt to engage voluntary associations such as churches and community-based organizations in operational activities, will strengthen the impact of these projects.

Building on the utility and accessibility of small businesses, microenterprise loan funds and community-based organizations will not only develop viable self-employment options for the disadvantaged, but also begin to revitalize the municipal economy. In a restructuring economy, expanding self-employment opportunities is as important to economic vitality and competitiveness as it is to the goal of greater economic opportunity for all our citizens. Microenterprises can renovate a municipal economy at the most basic level, providing self-employment for the economically marginal and revitalizing urban markets by creating as well as meeting demand. The potential impact of self-employment includes the generation of additional businesses and jobs induced by the new role models, revitalized communities, new attitudes, and changed institutions. And, not insignificantly, economic networks created at the lower levels of an economy can help funnel down the benefits of "big bang" interventions that take place closer to the top.

Athena Young of Sandtown was one of the stronger students in the first BOSS microenterprise class. Before coming to BOSS, she had already developed plans for a business, but kept getting turned down by the banks. Figuring that if she had a house for collateral, they might lend her money, she started looking into city programs for low-income homeownership. To her disappointment, she found that "low-income" was something of a misnomer: in fact, no low-income person could afford the houses the city was offering. But her quest for a house induced her to network, and she learned these new skills rapidly. In the end, it may well be that the search for a house was more important to Young than getting the house. She learned how to call people and follow through and nail things down.

"The government agencies like the Urban Services Agency, that's where you start," she said. "But they can't solve your problem. The churches, they're mainly concerned about your soul, you know. They want you to pray before they'll give you anything. And the community organizations are so scattered. I'd like to see all these different sources come together so people wouldn't get so worn out going from place to place. The way it is now, it's really discouraging. So many people live with problems all their lives. Others go to social services for one thing, then to the churches for another. Once the problem is solved, though, they become complacent again."

Networking among business, financial, social service, women's, community development, and neighborhood groups can provide invaluable contacts for the microentrepreneur. Networking, which is facilitated in the black community by a command of the vernacular, can directly link an individual's capacity to produce with available resources and with consumer demand. Such relationships can reduce unprofitable competition, increase program efficiency, create more effective program targeting, enhance credibility, and, therefore, produce better results. Community-based organizations provide not only clients, a local economy, physical space, and fiscal and social sup ports, but also political support for microenterprise development, building coalitions around economic issues and advocating supportive policies from City Hall. A good training/mentor program can help link these community business and social networks together.

Bernita Holsey of BOSS argued that microenterprises, once begun, can better withstand pressures due to economic reversals than the giant multinational behemoths can.

"With big business, it's the line they're in or nothing. That's the reason for all those suicides during the Depression. That's why they have to get bigger—to diversify, to hedge their bets. But that makes them bureaucratic and unmanageable. And then they're right back where they started. But small business people are very resourceful," she said, with a wry smile. "Especially blacks. They may be limited in terms of sales, but they can still make quick shifts, moving easily from selling food to computer programming to elder and day care, for example. "

Small businesses can "think faster, change more quickly, establish better internal communication, and tailor their products and services to smaller markets." [3] Homegrown businesses, cottage industries, service companies, small stores, design firms, and contract manufacturers "fly under the commercial radar of the big corporations, free to create their market niche." [4] Microenterprise development is a community strategy that enhances and utilizes existing human and capital resources, and it proceeds best when microentrepreneurs are networked together. Thus, an alternative paradigm for economic development is presented—a people-centered, do-it-yourself endeavor that proceeds in incremental steps.

Boss trainees are quick to shift gears if an initial idea does not seem feasible. Athena Young's first business idea was a candystore, for example, but when it proved infeasible, she switched to preparing herself to do desktop publishing for community organizations. It was her focus on community service that remained constant. She wanted to stay in Sandtown and give something back. She wanted to be a local role model, and prove that someone from the neighborhood could accomplish something. She first thought of the candystore because she remembered the black owners of the corner store on the block where she grew up. They got up every day and went to work.

These are the kind of upwardly mobile working-class and lower middle-class people who do not live in the community any more. "They're extinct, a dying breed," said Young. "There's nothing for kids to relate to. Kids don't really want to learn negative behavior; there's just no other examples available. But we're relearning. If you sweep out in front of your door, pretty soon other people start doing it, too. It makes an impression. We've got to do more of that."

Young often talks about her community and how it could be pushed in a positive direction. "Don't drive people away from your stoop if they're sitting there. Talk to them." Of all the BOSS students, she was probably the most excited about the prospect of pursuing her business goals in the context of her own neighborhood. She is not one of the elderly civic ladies, the "grandmother types" that Morris Iles referred to as running the churches and the neighborhoods, and that Arthur Murphy described as the backbone of the city's black electoral strength. She is not retired. She is raising children and trying to make a living, yet she still finds the time to be involved in her community.

Though the CBIP Economic Development Task Force states as one of its objectives the promotion of entrepreneurship among community residents and the development of a merchants' association, members are still focusing more on the kind of high-profile, "big bang" projects that can be carried forward only with significant government assistance. Microenterprise approaches should also be stressed, however, because they can be duplicated in communities without the tremendous influx of public funds that Sandtown has recently experienced. Young, for example, felt a need to find the entrepreneurs who are working out of their homes and have not reached the level of setting up shop in a separate building. The first step is probably to contact the street vendors who come out to North Avenue, one of Sandtown's two main commercial thoroughfares. Another possibility is to use community bulletin boards, such as those set up in supermarkets. Observing that several young men in the neighborhood cut hair in their homes, Young wondered whether the barbers and beauty parlor owners of the community might be willing to teach some of their skills at the Resource Center conceived as part of the Nehemiah Project.

This led us to a discussion of the concept of a skills bank, described by the Community Information Exchange in Washington, D.C. A key technique for economic networking, a skills bank or skills exchange is a registry of people signed up to sell, rent, or barter their products, services, tools, machinery, or working space, specifying in advance what they have to offer, the time it will be available, and any other conditions they have set for the exchange. By setting up a skills bank, a community-based organization can match residents' skills with residents' needs, facilitate work on community projects, develop a referral file for employment outside the community, and generally raise the level of mutuality in the neighborhood. Registrants can also be solicited from outside the community—from service agencies, area colleges and universities, businesses and corporations. Or the system can be designed to encourage bartering among community residents alone. A barter system works best when it is not limited to an exchange between person A and person B, but rather sets up a banking system in which A's service to B earns him or her a credit that can be used to "purchase" services from any participant in the skills bank. The credits are based on a dollar figure for the work done. Operating the skills bank is a fairly low-cost endeavor, requiring perhaps a halftime staff person and some minimal printing, mailing, and telephone costs. Part of the Sandtown project involves re-creating public schools as part of the support network for the entire community, and a public school might be a good place for a skills bank to be housed. The skills bank concept can also be expanded to include a learning exchange, in which people share their skills or teach "perspective" courses on religion or philosophy, environmental concerns, creative writing, and the like.

The Civic Dimension

"It's very important to find and cultivate the informal leadership of the community," Darnell Ridgley observed. "The formal leaders are the homeowners, the stable folk—the people who are articulate, the people who have something. They're very important—they are the traditional leadership of the black community, and we're lucky to have them. Too many of them leave the community, abandoning the struggle. But the only way the process of empowerment can continue is if new leadership continues to surface, not always to stand out in front, but also to fill in the gaps, to maintain communications and dialogue among all the people in the community."

Ridgley summed up her task in the spring of 1991 as follows: "Empowerment means teaching people how to take care of themselves. People are ready to work hard and want to be recognized for what they do, but they also want limits. You have to know how to move from the conceptual to the concrete; otherwise you lose people. Few people want to sit and plan for four, five hours. People have to go to their jobs and work, you have to understand this. We've been working people to death [in the CBIP planning process] since October of 1990. It's important not to waste people's time; you can't get them all stirred up with last-minute proposals. A facilitator needs skills to deal with community people in this kind of process to keep them involved over a long period of time."

The key to successful social action is to insure that the process remains community-driven. Ridgley advised starting with the formal leadership and beginning a process that enables one to discover the informal leadership, and recruit them as well. Personal contact is very important, and the contact must be maintained. An additional component, obviously beyond what government can supply, is the spiritual direction needed for lifestyle changes that can reduce susceptibility to drugs and crime, and increase motivation for school achievement. From the outset of CBIP, Ridgley was convinced that city and Enterprise staff should not be at the center of this process. She felt that mediating institutions such as churches, social clubs, and community centers were vital partners.

By the Summer of 1991, Darnell Ridgley was no longer project manager for CBIP. She had earlier proved very useful to the mayor in managing the Community Development Block Grant program, and she was reassigned to that program when problems surfaced between HUD and the city administration. At the same time, Barbara Bostick, the former warden of the city jail, was assigned essentially to take Ridgley's place at CBIP. Arnie Graf of BUILD mentioned that the symbolism of making a former prison official the head of citizen empowerment was, at best, unfortunate. Some community leaders, formal and informal, complained that Bostick seemed removed from the process and from the people, and apparently more comfortable with the technocrats and professionals Enterprise had brought in to the project.

CBIP's overall objective was to build a "viable, working community in which neighborhood residents are empowered to direct and sustain the physical, social, and economic development of their community." All public and private support systems were to be focused on this objective, creating a community "fulfilling to existing residents, which provides for community economic self-determination, while also being attractive to potential new residents." The CBIP work groups established in October 1990 were followed by a meeting in May 1991 to mobilize community residents once again and involve them in an intensive "charrette," or planning process, to review the results of the work groups and chart Sandtown's future development. Attendance at this meeting was disappointing, however, down to 150 people, despite organizing efforts by SWIA and BUILD during the summer of 1990. The staff and leadership of the various task forces met, discussing issues with those community residents and others who were present. Although attendance was disappointing, community representatives and city and Enterprise staff forged on, formulating plans in all key areas.

After this second CBIP community meeting, Athena Young became very concerned. The poor turnout seemed to have undercut the meeting's usefulness as a means of ascertaining community wishes. It had not been sufficiently advertised, more flyers should have gone out, more doors been knocked on, she insisted. Apparently many others who attended that day felt so as well. Thus, despite the energy of "informal" leaders like Young, the CBIP concept began losing ground. Without continuous and extensive community participation, physical redevelopment started getting ahead of economic development, and civic development lagged even further behind. Housing was being built, but the "social infrastructure" that was supposed to be the showpiece of the project was at a standstill. BUILD was only peripherally involved. The project was being carried forward mainly by Enterprise and the city, and Enterprise was taking the lead.

Angela Murray (a pseudonym) is an executive of one of the foundations Enterprise has solicited for funds for its "social infrastructure" project in Sandtown. She was troubled by Enterprise's ever-expanding role there and led me to believe that others in the foundation circle felt the same. "Enterprise shouldn't be growing," she said. "They've got holding companies to handle all the money they receive, they're becoming big conglomerates. They're developing relationships with banks, not with people. They're not about empowerment, or if they are, they don't know how to go about it. They should be creating capacity in communities. Instead, they're developing capacity in themselves, and the communities that they go into have to keep asking them to come back to do the work. My impression of Enterprise in Sandtown is that they're being very heavy-handed. The community people that they trot out look like window dressing. It seems as if Schmoke's people are hardly involved at all. Enterprise is running the whole show."

"Jim Rouse is really getting on in years, and he's not really the CEO of Enterprise any more," a Baltimore community organizer, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. "He wants Enterprise to focus on social and community development, not just physical development, and he's picked one man, Pat Costigan, to make that happen. The only place they're doing it is in Baltimore, so they have a lot on the line. Costigan's approach has been to try to get lots of financial support for the project, bringing in lots of other foundations and philanthropic groups." (A mark of Enterprise's power, and its approach, seems to be its ability to create critics who wish to remain anonymous. )

Athena Young, speaking as a community representative at a briefing held by Enterprise for perhaps two dozen foundation executives, warned that focusing on physical development alone was like building a shiny new car for the Sandtown community without providing the means to maintain it. "Without oil, that car won't run, it will break down quickly. The oil is the soul and spirit of the community, brought to the project by active, continuous participation," she said. But Enterprise and the city continued to fall short on bringing in the community. Roslyn Branson, former head of Family START, a federal and state-funded social service coordination project on the edges of Sandtown, was engaged by the city as a part-time consultant to work on improving relationships with the community. Yet Branson herself had left Family START amid allegations that she could not effectively reach out to community people. Young told me in February 1992 that as far as the community was concerned, the ball had simply been dropped.

"Things were really jumping in the beginning. Now we don't hear anything from anybody. They are just not letting people in the community know what is going on. They respond to my calls now, be cause I guess they think I'm a troublemaker. But other people just get ignored. Harold, you've got to feed people every day," she said. "They need attention and recognition. You can't just throw them a scrap every couple of months and expect them to believe that things are changing. They have to feel it as part of their lives. Coming in every couple of months and spending a lot of money to rally people just won't do it."

Darnell Ridgley, before her departure, recognized that support for community organizing and development is essential. Support systems have to be rebuilt in black communities, devastated by the loss of middle-class leadership and institutional leverage. "All black children are affected by what is happening in low-income black communities today," Ridgley maintained. "Sandtown is a good place to start. It is a real community, with all the problems, all the history, and a tradition of solidarity, of dealing with problems within the borders of the community." Until she left the Sandtown Project, Ridgley expected eventually to expand the formal leadership of Sandtown with a permanent management structure that would represent an ongoing commitment on the part of the city (ideally, the Mayor or a representative was to be a member): a large pool of community people trained in reading budgets and balance sheets, meeting procedures, and the like. She hoped for a sortition process (rotating leadership) so that a large number of these trained community people would actually participate in the process of CBIP governance.

"Community involvement must go beyond block parties and health fairs," Ridgley said. "People must have something to do, must feel needed. Many of their differences will be resolved in the context of collaborative work." She wanted the community contingent in the management structure formally divided into a board, which would meet with outside funding sources and policymakers, and a much larger community advisory group, from which board members would be selected and to which the board would remain responsible, perhaps through a periodic vote of confidence. The advisory board would be strengthened by rotating leadership and continual leadership training. Advisory board members would have to keep records so that those who took their places would not lose the history of what had happened on the board to date. Ridgley wanted the community to invest itself in the project and keep reinvesting. The community advisory board would provide the board of directors with its mandate to speak for the community on external matters. The management structure as a whole was to have responsibility for determining which aspects of the community plan would be acted upon first. As plans were implemented, the management group would have to keep track of programs as they evolved and changed, trying wherever possible to latch on to and build upon what already existed in the community.

In the spring of 1992, with Ridgley gone, Barbara Bostick representing the city, and Enterprise running the show, this projected governance structure based on a compact between the "parties" (the community, the city, the Enterprise Foundation, SWIA, BUILD, and the Urban League) seemed far off indeed. The stakes had gone up for all players because Sandtown (along with Washington, DC) had been named as the site for the 1992 Jimmy Carter Community Work Project, in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity International, with which former First Lady Rosalyn Carter is affiliated. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were scheduled to work with Sandtown Habitat during a "blitz" construction of ten homes in June 1992, the first phase of a 100-house joint venture between Sandtown Habitat and the Enterprise Foundation. Their preliminary site visit in March of 1992, with the press, the city staff, and the neighborhood organizations and churches all agog, exposed the fault lines in the "partnership" that had been constructed in Sandtown.

While Enterprise and the city told everyone that BUILD was handling the community-organizing aspect of the project, Reverend Dobson and Gary Rodwell, BUILD's lead organizer, insisted to me that BUILD was not consulted, not involved, and had been marginalized in the process. "That just sets us up," Dobson remarked. "I've got to talk to Jim Rouse and tell him that we're pulling out unless we are involved, and permitted to do the kind of job that we're really capable of."

Ella Johnson, the chair of SWIA, is a large black woman with graying hair, a determined, almost professorial manner, and a delightfully sweet voice. It took many telephone calls to find a time when Johnson was not rushing off to one meeting or another. As she moved wearily into the conference room where our interview was to take place, slowly sat down, and began to speak about the prospects for Sandtown-Winchester under CBIP, she seemed physically burdened by the weight of many disappointments.

"There are twelve thousand people in Sandtown. The people in Sandtown who have been involved in the CBIP process are the most well off," she said. "The people who own their own homes, or have a job. Even the people who get helped by Habitat, Allan Tibbels, group, are folks who have a job, or who have a history of employment. The working poor in our neighborhood come out and sweep the streets, but even they are a far cry from the most damaged people. All the folks who are converging on our community in the CBIP process have a very limited idea of what community involvement really means. We've got to reach way down deep, get those people who have almost given up, to really make a difference here. Otherwise you're always skimming the cream off the top, and people get the idea that something's happening in the community, but it's not happening for them. It's nice that the mayor is around a lot, [presidential candidate Bill] Clinton came to Sandtown, that's more attention than the community has had for a long time: But there's been no money to dig deep into Sandtown, to reach the really poor, since Reagan was elected.

"Nehemiah, big as it is, is still only 273 new housing units. Over the last seven or eight years, 580 units have been added to the community. These units have helped the people who got them, but they haven't had an effect outside the block where they've been built." She rested her head against her hands, folded in front of her, as if she was offering a prayer. "Sandtown is really poor. There are lots of problems, high unemployment, female-headed households. People don't realize how serious it is. Folks have been on social services for a long time. You don't turn that around overnight. It will take five or six years before you see any difference at all. CBIP will address lots of these problems together, holistically, and that's very exciting. But it's going to take a long time, and continuous work, before you see any results you can measure."

Earlier that morning, I had met Barbara Bostick and Pat Costigan. The meeting was held in Costigan's office, and he ran the meeting. A red-haired, intense Irish-American with metal-rimmed spectacles and the breezy manner of an executive, he was all business. "We need to get this project evaluated," he said. "We've got to show our funders and supporters a base line, where we began, and a successive track record of what we've achieved, how far we've come."

Bostick, on the other hand, was hesitant, almost demure throughout the meeting. Slightly built and fastidiously dressed, with a soft voice, she spoke for another constituency in CBIP—the Mayor's Office. Her primary concern was that the expectations of Sandtown people not be raised to unrealistic levels, that all the major players in CBIP stay in the game, that no one leave the table or take offense.

Put the four major players together at one table—the city, Enterprise, SWIA, and BUILD—and you have four very different approaches to the community's problems, four different, strongly held mindsets about what the problem is and how it should be approached. Perhaps the starkest contrast was between Ella Johnson and Pat Costigan. Johnson, with the weight of experience, starts and stops, many failures and that minimal number of successes necessary to keep her and her group going, was sure that the renovation of Sandtown's social and civic infrastructure, its sense of community, and its quality of life, was going to take a long time and would be hard to measure. Costigan, in a hurry, pressured by his supervisors and funders to show quick results to justify the money being spent and to qualify for more, was talking about evaluating a process that, in Johnson's view, had barely begun.

BUILD, for its part, is unwilling even to stay at the table as long as organizing is not going on. Ella Johnson told me that SWIA had begun an effort in February 1991, during Darnell Ridgley's tenure at CBIP, to organize Sandtown block by block, to counter the disappointing results of organizing attempts under CBIP during the summer of 1990. "We were looking at four- and five-square block areas," she said. "The people were starting to see the problems of the whole community by starting with the problems on their own block. We had people working on cleaning up their streets, we had citizen building inspectors starting up, people had something to do, they were getting involved. Then we were going to link them up to look at things that affected everybody—crime, vacant houses, things like that."

It was in May of 1991 that the disappointing second charrette was held, and, soon after, Enterprise staff and city staff proceeded ahead, apparently assuming the community had lost interest. Ironically, it was this development and others like it which followed that left community people feeling shut out and apathetic, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Then the foundations came in to observe, and they wanted to know, 'Where was the community?' So Enterprise and city staff had to go back to the drawing board on community involvement.

"There are powerful players here," said Johnson. "Smaller groups like SWIA are getting shoved around, elbowed out of the process. Even the city doesn't have the leverage it used to. Under Model Cities, federal money used to go right to the mayor. Now, it goes to a joint venture that Enterprise is part of, and the city doesn't have the final say as to how the money gets spent or how the project proceeds And groups like Enterprise are still making developers' profits and drawing all the talent that used to go to city administrations."

Johnson echoed my own thoughts. Earlier in the day, Costigan and Bostick had wanted to know what I thought of the CBIP process, from what I had seen so far. "There's an old African proverb," I told them. "When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. What I see is a set of four really powerful players—Enterprise, the city, SWIA, and BUILD—struggling to make CBIP come out right from their own institutional perspectives. They create a pretty strong wind at the top. If the process isn't rooted really deeply into the community, it will be blown right over. I think you have some catching up to do on the ground. I don't think that you should feel particularly disappointed that more progress hasn't been made in organizing the community in that way, because very few people know how to do that."

"Yeah," said Costigan ruefully. "Every time we turn around, some graduate student pops up who's just done his Ph.D. thesis on community organizing and thinks he knows how it's done. That's why we've tried to keep this quiet, why we haven't marketed it yet. Lots of people want to jump on board the train as soon as they see it's rolling. There's a great deal of organizing capacity in Sandtown—the churches, the service agencies with outreach functions, formal and informal leadership. There's lots of history, lots of agendas. We want the whole thing to come together, create unity out of diversity. That's why we wanted to hold off on the organizing until the community came up with a vision. Then we could fill in the details."

It was, of course, the decision to have large meetings, develop a vision out of such meetings, and then narrow participation to small planning groups that created the perception in the community that nothing was going on, that they had been hoodwinked, again.

"We're struggling to keep the top-down stuff from taking over," Bostick said. "We know it can't be a quick fix. But we had to do some programmatic things right away, so people could see some results. Things are happening. We're advertising jobs in the community newsletter, and the Urban League tells us that there's a pride in people's voices now, when they call in for jobs that must be filled by Sandtown residents. 'I'm from Sandtown,' they say.

"We tended to work with the vocal and articulate people to make things happen, to get the newsletter out, get the word out," she continued "Now we've got to make it clear that we haven't anointed those people as community leaders. We know the process hasn't served the whole community yet. We wanted to go door-to-door with that newsletter; we had five thousand copies printed. But we just didn't have the personnel. We're hoping it will get circulated and recirculated throughout the community. There are so many people beyond the most vocal, people we don't even know about. We're trying to find a comfort level here. Like Pat says, there are so many experts, so many people wanting to get involved, we don't know when to say, "Enough." Someone is always showing up, like you, who has something we need to hear. There is a wealth of knowledge, a lot of networking going on, people giving us their cards, telling us to call them if we need anything. When do we reach closure? We don't want this to be another letdown for community people, like the old urban renewal efforts in Harlem Park. What happens after Kurt Schmoke isn't mayor any more? Sandtown will still be there."

Costigan shared with me a newspaper article that Jim Rouse, founder of Enterprise, wrote for the Miami Herald on transforming the lives of the poor. (Enterprise has a project in Miami as well.) The letter emphasized the approach Rouse and Enterprise know best: bringing public and private resources to bear on changing the physical and social service dimension of the community. Thus, the conditions in which community pride and involvement can grow are created. The agenda for the physical and service transformation comes out of a planning process in which community leaders and volunteers work with experienced professionals. Yet the Rouse/Enterprise method, as it has developed in Sandtown, has too much of what Harry Boyte describes as the "therapeutic" approach, and not enough of the "empowerment" approach. In the therapeutic approach, experts define and diagnose the problem, generate the language and labels for talking about it, propose the therapeutic or remedial techniques for problem-solving, and evaluate whether the problem has been solved. In such approaches, community involvement is placed in the framework of representative rather than participatory democracy. Even in the middle-class milieu of everyday politics, people are demanding more accountability from and contact with their leadership. In a community in which the civic and social fabric has deteriorated as much as it has in Sandtown, even more contact and involvement is required.

As of the spring of 1992, Enterprise's priorities for community involvement and organizing were plain in its draft report on CBIP which Costigan showed me so that I would have complete information from all sides. The report revealed only a relatively small amount of money ($80,000) allocated for community organizing, and there were indications that community organizing would be relegated to the later stages of the CBIP process. [5] The report referred to community organizing as "subjective" (and presumably less important).6 Clearly, it was these subjective elements of CBIP for which it was most difficult to secure funding, because business, government, and foundation personnel want to be able to measure results in quantitative terms. In this way the money that was available for CBIP probably drove the process. Enterprise directed its funding pitch, apparently, to where staff thought patrons wanted their money to go—for physical development and social services. Less funding was requested for community organizing than for any other item save community surveyors, sanitation training and education, and the community newsletter. The impression one gets on reading the CBIP draft report is of a top-down process with a therapeutic spin to it—service, but not empowerment.

In a community of twelve thousand people, a great many more than two hundred have to be continuously involved to make the process work. Jim Rouse's Miami Herald piece brimmed with enthusiasm and energy about CBIP because he was directly involved, making decisions, meeting people, networking, getting feedback, being challenged. Rouse and others like him who engage, admirably, in tackling the problems of poor people need to understand the need to share with community people the prestige of being identified as a person with something to contribute, of being presented with a problem and trying to solve it. Many people in the community must have access to such experience. Street fairs, charrettes, and mass meetings will not accomplish this. It was time for the city and Enterprise to resume block-by-block organizing. If that was not done, it would not matter how much money was funneled into the project—a great many people were going to be very disappointed in the results. At a later meeting with Costigan, Bostick, and Lenny Jackson, a canny, sharp SWIA organizer who has been hired for CBIP by the Mayor's Office, I was informed that CBIP's budget for community organizing had been tripled.

In Sandtown, an attempt is being made to rebuild the social as well as the physical infrastructure of one of Old West Baltimore's most famous neighborhoods. Government officials, church leaders, community organizers, and nonprofit foundation executives have come together in an uneasy alliance to accomplish this objective. It is clear that there are many obstacles and that all the players have a lot to learn about the Sandtown community as well as about each other. Many wrong turns will be taken before the right path is found. The stakes are high, and the results, whether success or failure, will be far-reaching. The key factor is the involvement of the community, its existing institutions, and its remaining vernacular strength.

Notes

2. Ibid.

3. Paul Hawken, Growing a Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 47.

4. Ibid., pp. 48, 52.

5. Enterprise Foundation, "The Process of Neighborhood Transformation" (Baltimore: Enterprise Foundation, 1992); Enterprise Foundation, "The Community Planning Process" (Baltimore: Enterprise Foundation, 1992).

6. Enterprise Foundation, "Community Building in Partnership," draft report (Baltimore: Enterprise Foundation, 1992), p. 52.

Bibliography

________. "The Community Planning Process." Baltimore: Enterprise Foundation, 1992.

________. "The Process of Neighborhood Transformation." Baltimore: Enterprise Foundation, 1992.

Hawken, Paul. Growing a Business. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Pierce, Neil, and Curtis W. Johnson. "The Neighborhoods: New Hope Glimmers for the Future." Baltimore Morning Sun, May 5, 1991.

More Information

Enterprise Foundation's web site: www.enterprisefoundation.org.

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