Alinsky Bashing

"If it's a Republican debate night, it's time for a Saul Alinsky reference."

Jason Horowitz,"Saul Alinsky lives on in GOP rhetoric." The Washington Post, January 24, 2012.

I know that having a political villain is not always about facts. But still, picking on Saul Alinsky for the wrong reasons is annoying. Maybe Alinsky is just a proxy.

Alinsky was no lover of big government or the War on Poverty. And in the early years he worked as much with socially conservative, white ethnic, working-class and moderate-income neighborhoods as with "disenfranchised" communities, that is, communities of color. Organizing issues dealt with issues like good schools, decent housing, parks, and neighborhood change.

And what could be closer to the heart of conservatives than building upon "mediating institutions" like churches, clubs, and civic associations. Indeed, the Tea Party folks should probably pay more attention to Alinsky's advice about organization building for the long term.

Sky-HIgh Attribution

"Our research found that every dollar grantmakers and other donors invested in policy and civic engagement provided a return of $115 in benefit"

National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy

I'm a big fan of advocacy, community organizing, and civic engagement -- but economic returns like this are almost otherwordly and certainly leave out lots of other actors and contributing factors. And, of course, there is the problem of attribution -- what causes what. Raising the question of attribution can be a show stopper -- and I do think the advocacy world requires a different way of attribution thinking than gold standard methods that haunt other fields. But we need ways of communicating the importance of advocacy and civic engagement without straining standards of common sense. Are there advocacy homeruns? I hope so. Should an investor expect to hit a home run each time they make an investment in advocacy? I don't think so.

Overcoming Success

"Jobs shared what he saw to be his major mistake during those tumultuous years: Letting a desire for profitability outweigh passion."

Catharine Smith, "What Steve Jobs Learned from his Biggest Failure," Huffington Post, October 23, 2011

By passion Jobs is talking about product -- design and technology on behalf of users. What does this kind of mistake look like in the social sector. Expansion, funding, or leadership recognition equates to profitability. A commitment to mission or social justice equates with passion. Lesson: Stick to core values. Of course, success helps.

Cut and Invest?

"It's a progressive agenda on a Tea Party allowance....smart ways to invest in education and infrastructure to generate growth while cutting overall spending to balance the budget."

Thomas L. Friedman, "A Progressive in the Age of Austerity," The New York Times, October 16, 2011.

Chicago's current mayor and two of the last three mayors (Daley and Washington) have been dubbed progressives by various pundits. All of them grappled at one time or another with tough budgets and up and down economies. Looking at the latest Chicago version, I can't help but conclude that our aspirations of "progressive" have shrunk, Now it's "cut and invest," a sound bite from a public policy textbook, but sensible in its own way.

Somehow we need to marry cut and invest with a vision for better, more just and prosperous cities and regions. Somehow we need to marry cut and invest with fairness and balance. Somehow we need to marry top down cut and invest with grassroots energy, innovation, and leadership.

Cut and invest is good rhetoric and hopefully good practice. But we need a bigger vision of progressive if we are going to get out of this mess.

Art Invasion

"The idea that art can be an economic engine is hardly new, and a walk through SoHo, Venice Beach or Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood shows it can work."

Elisabeth Currid-Halkett, "Where Do Bohemians Come From?" NYT, October 16, 2011.

This op-ed is quite cautionary about the arts and economic development. My argument, reflection, simmering anger is about the reference to "Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood" as an arts community. This reality is more than thirty years in the making and is as much a story of public neglect, art slumlords, and the expansion of University of Illinois. And I hope it's still just a beachhead. Pilsen is a Mexican American community with lots of local industry in different pockets. Any calculation of an "economic engine" would have to take into account the losses. And, in some sense, it's just been another version of gentrification by artists for sure but most those who like arty tone and old buildings.

Battle Authentic?

"These forces of redevelopment have smoothed the uneven layers of grit and glamour, swept away traces of contentious history, cast doubt on the idea that poor people have a right to live and work here too--all that had made the city authentic."

Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

I am naturally disposed to this argument about the passing authenticity of cities and its relation to small shop, mixed use, immigrant neighborhoods. But then I catch myself: Whose "authentic" am I talking about? What is authentic anyway? But, yes, new development homogenizes.

Authentic is one of those words like "innovative" that we should probably ban from our day-to-day vocabulary. In the name of urban dynamism, we suddenly get stuck on one version of the city. And the passing of urban authenticity feels a lot like our perennial "death of community" stories about the good old days.

And are poor people the only attribute that made cities authentic? What about urban economies? Trains? Mega infrastructure? Tall buildings? Urban Design?

It would be a worthwhile endeavor to search metro areas for signs of spontaineity, mixed use, people defying design, immigrant enclaves, market making. I suspect we would need to look and listen in new ways. That said, I still miss the old stuff that was already on its way out when I got to know it.

Heads Up!

"...[W]e will need nothing short of a quantum, sector-wide change to accomplish our important missions in this new era of brutal austerity."

Mario Morino, Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity

In short, Morino argues that we will experience a head-on collision between budget cutting, economic stagnation, and the world of nonprofits. This will not be a new phenomenon but rather a continuation and deepening of what what we've experienced during the past few years. Focus on the notion of "quantum."

Some nonprofit groups will not survive; others will merge; still others will form new kinds of partnerships and alliances; some will simply piece together resources in a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo; and some nonprofits will seize new opportunities as the role of govenrment changes. Morino's notion of "sector-wide change" is that the nonprofit sector will need to more fully embrace his version of "outcomes" management. In other words, he believes that economic scarcity will require fundemental changes in how many nonprofits operate, not simply for efficiency and survival but to achieve their outcomes and mission.

There is still a lot of work to be done even if Morino's vision for the future is only partially true And Morino wisely frames this challenge for the nonprofit sector -- philanthropy and other investors, technical assistance providers, trade associations, membership networks, researchers, and advocates.

Disruption and Execution

"Leaders are inherently disruptive, dissatisfied with the status quo, questioning...Managers, by contrast, have to keep the trains running on time...There must be balance."

Mario Morino, Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity

Is it possible for one person in an organization to play both these roles at once? Maybe in start-up or when an organization is relatively small -- but at a certain point these roles pull in different directions. That's why we often see a division of labor among leaders/managers.

Do these roles only get played at the top. Good management should occur throughout the organization. Should disruption? Innovation often occurs at the periphery, not at the center.

Morino advises wisely that when an organization is ready to act, disruption time is over and everyone should "get on the bus." Does it really work that way?

Performance Culture

"So why do so few nonprofit professionals manage to outcomes despite a genuine passion for achieving mission?...One big reason is that nonprofit leaders... are not encouraged or supported to manage well. Many were 'knighted into their leadership positions because of their commitment...A second, related reason is that funders generally don't provide the kind of financial support that nonprofits need in order to make the leap to managing to outcomes."

Mario Morino, Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity

A third mistake is that we collectively set a low bar for success -- lot's of activities and interim achievements but few stretch results. And, in fact, we set multiple low bars for success, take your pick. Who is willing to buck this kind of success and the rewards that come with it for more powerful results. Some do, and they are pathbreakers. Many do not.

Failure Learning

"In 2000, Deshpande told students at his IIT alma mater in India that one of his early failures, with Coral Networks, made him a better entrepreneur. It showed him he could survive defeat. 'I am now more comfortable taking on bigger challenges, because I am not afraid of failure.'"

Richard T. Herman and Robert L. Smith, Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy (and how they will save the American Worker

Simple insight, difficult to make a part of our personal cult of success. Several weeks ago I attended a LISC/Urban Institute conference at the Chicago Federal Reserve on neighborhood and regional labor markets. Mark Elliot of Mobility Inc. shared a failure story about Bridges to Work -- major demo in 1990s about reverse commuting run by P/PV. His story was clear, based on evaluation data, and extremely helpful in clarifying our assumptions about jobs and regions. Some things don't work -- and it's good for all us to understand so we can make new investments.

Cities and Suburbs?

"In the line of descent from Jane Jacobs, he [Richard Florida] sees cities as the sites of small-scale,unplanned human interactions that, in the aggregate, yield big civilizational rewards."

Nicholas Lemann, "Get Out of Town: Has the celebration of cities gone too far?" The New Yorker, June 27, 2011.

Jacobs and her advocates saw more than random "unplanned interactions," the aesthetic, ethical, and entrepreneurial opportunities generated by people mixing it up. We need to understand how this is playing out today, not just on the streets, in fact maybe less so these days, but inside, between and among companies, networks, buildings. Is place central to these interactions or just a pleasant, engaging backdrop?

Lemann doesn't question whether cities -- at least the creative enclaves -- are more or less interesting as compared to the suburbs. This was once the case. Now? Edge cities, older suburbs, etc. have morphed in their own peculiar ways into more interesting places. Lemann also spends little time discussing the growing ethnic and racial diversity in some cities and suburbs.

And the rallying cry now for many is metros, not cities.

Rearguard Wisdom?

"This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding."

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities

Would the books's first line be the same if Jane wrote it today. Not much urban renewal or highway building is going on -- public housing redevelopment (Hope Vl), transit-oriented development, the expansion of universities and other anchors, some big infrastructure now and again, and, of course, gentrification. Take public housing redevelopment: Jane Jacobs is probably referenced as a part of the answer for the new mixed-income communities being built to replace many of these planning disasters.

"But for all its harbingery, Death and Life is essentially silent on three entangled issues that have proven central to American cities over the past fifty years: race, poverty, and education."

Christopher Klemek,"Dead or Alive at Fifty? Reading Jane Jacobs on Her Golden Anniversary." Dissent, Spring 2011.

Klemek is quick to add that she fought racism and poverty in New York and Toronto. It's just that her market-based urbanism, community libertarianism, and distrust of government interventions doesn't leave much room for big-time interventions to solve these problems. And we've seen the results of that.

He adds that maybe Jane has little to say to an entrenched suburban nation.

"Should the billions of new urbanites need a user's manual for how our species can get along sustainably in this planet's burgeoning cities, I can think of now better recommendation than this old New Yorker's rearguard polemic."

The Secret's Out

"I've said it before and I'll say it again," [Department of Labor Secretary]Solis told the crowd of nearly 500, "joint apprenticeships are one of this country's best kept secrets. But from the National Mall this morning, I'm proud to let the secret out!"

DOL News Brief, June 9, 2011

And the apprenticeship system truely is the unrecognized jewel of U.S. training that combines learn and earn, mentorships, wage growth and benefits, employer/union investments, and certifications. Some apprenticeships are even articulating with community and technical colleges so workers can obtain post-secondary credentials.

But there is another secret that needs to get out -- the high drop out rate of construction-related apprentices -- in the range of 50-70%, much higher for apprentices of color. And this isn't just a recession problem. A similar problem exists in our other highly-touted gem -- the community college system. We should really figure this out while we're letting the secret out.

Innovation Mistake?

"The $300 house will fail as a social initiative because the dynamic needs, interests and aspirations of the millions of people who live in places like Dharavi have been overlooked. This kind of mistake is all too common in the trendy field of social entrepreneurship."

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, "Hands Off Our Houses," The New York Times, June 1, 2011.

Understanding customer needs, assets, skills, and context seems like it would be a "no brainer" for any kind of business solution, social enterprise or otherwise. And I suspect customers will be different in different community and economic contexts. I think we've learned from this mistake before. Of course, other relevant mistakes include generalizing from one community to another and relying upon focus groups for market information. I mistake I observed in some jobs and workforce investments several years ago was that some organizations and enterprising people prefer innovation to results. But, sadly, they don't always go together.

Globalness

"The three fundemental components of this program [Richard M. Daley] include promotion of Chicago as a global city, the reorganization of a variety of municipal and independent agency service functions, and social inclusivity at the elite level."

Larry Bennett, The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism

Bennett recognizes that Daley's global goal "is in no way a striking or innovative policy preference." But globalness was his way to woo the academics, the investors, and some of the disenchanted.

"[I]n utopia speak, "a global player" [is} wildly attractive to investors and tourists; in truth, starved of resources for schools, transit, housing, and street-cleaning, bursting at its welfare seams, and prey at the highest levels of public service to multi-million-dollar boondoggles and conflicts of interest."

Deanne Taylor, "Between Utopias," In: What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, edited by Stephen A. goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth

And that's Toronto

Top CD Ideas?

"Thinking back on the ideas that have really made a difference and stood the test of time, I settle on three: creation and expansion of community development corporations (and their intermediaries), the practice of asset-based community development, and vehicles to provide affordable capital. These three ideas encompass the essential elements of any change strategy: a structure for change, a vision for change, and a strategy for change."

Suzanne Morse, Communities Revisited: The Best Ideas of the Last Hundred Years, The National Civic Review, Vol 100, No 1. Spring 2011.

It's worth saying that the goal of community development is to help create resilient, connected, opportunity-rich, connected, affordable, and engaged communities, transcending all dichotomies and deadends of people or place thinking.

Of course, I have to ask, why just three big ideas? And why pick three from the last fifty years (two from the last thirty) while saying you are looking at the whole century. What might one find in those lonesome years.

Well, community organizing from the 1930s on would be one idea. The notion that people can obtain power for the betterment of their communities by joining together. A variant of organizing would be the advocacy-type planning that helped stopped highways, urban renewal, etc.

Settlement houses are of a different vintage -- but might be included under CDCs and neighborhood resource centers. Maybe the discovery of neighborhood or community as a nexus for engagement, investment, and development would be worth considering. This wasn't a given.

A few recent ideas are worth considing, perhaps as amendments or revisions to CDCs, etc. Community building became a counter trend to the narrow physical development focus of CDCs in the 1980s. There's recently been a rebound to the older, more holistic version of community development. And today the buzz is about regional equity -- in organizing, policy, and development. CDCs are not always nimble enough to play in the "outside game."

Picking a few important ideas is a useful exercise. What else isn't on the list?

Jane's Space

"Utopia is a destination, so beautiful and beneficial for all, quite a few must be hideously sacrificed en route. (Toronto's) civic imagination is shaped by generations of immigrants unfit for utopias around the world: people who fled Divine Monarchs, Great Oarsmen, Beloved Leaders, Infallible Clerics, Infamous Tyrants and Obscure Social Engineers, war, reservation, pogrom, gulag, holocaust, apartheid, genocide, slavery, conscription, torture, and endless utopian techniques of great evil for a Greater Good. Toronto's collective anthem or civic prayer maight be 'No megalomania please, we're between utopias.'"

Deanne Taylor, Between Utopias, in What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, edited by Stephen A. Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth.

And so we enter the world of Jane Jacobs.Not everyone can play in this anti planner realm -- you need a combination of base resources and entrepreneurial self sufficiency. People organize themselves in small spaces -- taverns,churches,parks, coffee houses. Old-fashioned republican. Unfortunately, these spaces are fragile and difficult to maintain "between utopias."

Start with the End

"An urbanism that joins Mumford's panoramic communalism to Jacob's street-level sensibility is especially attractive as Americans confront the daunting challenges posed by global climate change...Cities...can provide the experiential grounding necessary to build popular enthusiasm both for the new Mumford/Jacobsian metropolis and an America prepared to reassert its egalitarian heritage."

Larry Bennett, The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism

As in much professional writing and storytelling, where we end is sometimes where we should have started. I'm afraid this is the case with this confusing book. It is as mixed up as our current cities and maybe that's the best we can expect. We ride a seesaw between Jacobs and Mumford, Washington and Daley, concentrated poverty and mixed-income communities, the first, second, and third cities, and so on. There's not much analysis of power, economics, or demography. And the question of whether the metro versus the city is the best unit of analyis doesn't make much of an appearance until the last chapter. Bennett seems to take plans and planning more seriously than most.

But I found a lot to enjoy in The Third City. Bennett covers most of the current literature about Chicago, has a very thoughtful reflection on the multiple sources of Richard M. Daley's urban investment plans, and has produced a superb analysis of the mixed-income experiment in Chicago.

Unfortunately, we also get caught up in his conceptual confusion about Jacobs and Mumford, the three cities frame, Daley as "manager of detail" and Daley as the financial bankrupter and patronage boss, Chicago as a "city of neighborhoods" in a nation of cities who believe themselves to be "cities of neighborhoods," and a post industrial future in a country yearning for advanced manufacturing. We are admonished for believing in old tropes about Chicago, but the old keeps popping up and the new isn't quite so new. It is a confusing time.

Oddly, I end up agreeing with Bennett's grand finale about the future of cities. I'm just not sure what it means.

A Grand Experiment

"..(O)ne of the principal problems...with mixed-income neighborhood development in Chicago has been its mistaking the look of the city for the underlying processes that can sustain busy, congenial neighborhood life. The new urbanist builders of the mixed-income neighborhoods talke the Jacobs talk, but walk the upscale residential developer's walk."

Larry Bennett,The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism

Bennett's chapter on Chicago's Plan for Public Housing Transformation is the best in his book. It weaves a fascinating story containing the intellectual assumptions about concentrated poverty, the variations of housing advocacy and policy, and the real life of mixed-income communities for low-income residents. I remember a hsouing developer friend who described Chicago's Plan as "breathtaking." What comes across is a breakthtaking experiment in social engineering of a different sort.

One long time public housing resident observed,"Once you see dogs coming in, then you know the neighborhood is gone...."

Old-Fashioned Skills Training

"It will probably require a broad menu of policies attacking the problem all at once: expanding community colleges and online learning; changing the corporate tax code and labor market rules to stimulate investment; adopting German-style labor market practices like apprenticeship programs, wage subsidies and programs that extend benefits to the unemployed for six months as they start small businesses."

David Brooks, "The Missing Fifth," The New York Times, May 9, 2011

It's a big deal for a somewhat conservative commentator to evoke "German-style apprenticeships" as a part of the answer to declining employment rates for males in the U.S. I wonder when he will discover Denmark.

"We fund scholarships for students at community colleges and in other vocational programs...The people for whom we provide support are not those who intend to transfer to four-year universities. Rather, we are funding scholarships for those students who intend to enter a career immediately upon completion of their studies."

"Interview with Andrew Grove : The Angry Philanthopist." Philanthopy Magazine, April 1, 2011.

On a more sobering note, I was surprising (and maybe I shouldn't have been) the low completion rates of building trade's apprenticeships for people of color. How many of us thought that getting in was the tough part? And this existed before recession.