Core Issues in Comprehensive Community-Building Initiatives ...

ment. I knew a little about development, and I figured I
could be the bridge. But where I am now, I’ve learned a lot
about finance, and a lot about the cultural nuances of the
private sector. And I’m convinced that the community development
world is stuck in a way of thinking that doesn’t
begin to acknowledge the bottom line of development.
Money is power. Wealth creation is the bottom line.
I know now that you cannot do community economic
development without private investment. But the truth of private
investment is, unless you can frame it in terms of value
added and potential returns, investment won’t happen.
Social benefit is, frankly, irrelevant to the question of how
to attract private dollars to the inner city. Some of that can
be blamed on the culture around money-making. I see it
every day—when you deal with finances all your life, you
lose track of the importance of people. I sit in meetings
with people who’ve been doing nothing but making money
for 15 or 20 years. Their value system is embedded in that.
And there’s racism. Access to capital is the greatest
difficulty in business development. Most of the folks with
the investment dollars are white, Anglo-Saxon males, and
their comfort level is not to invest in inner-city communities
of color where they see no value or potential. When
you look at the data available through the Small Business
Administration, it becomes obvious that there are both
structural and systemic barriers to accessing capital for
people of color based solely on race and ethnicity. We do
need to overcome the racially-motivated drag on making
capital available to African Americans, in particular.
Mostly, however, institutions need to identify their
self-interest in investing in the inner-city, providing capital
to people of color. Today, self-interest means being able
to answer “yes” to the question, “Is it going to contribute
to growth and development regionally?” Inner cities are
fundamental to regional health. You can’t get around it.
The corporate sector tried to run away from this reality for
years, but now they’re starting to see it. Still, it takes really
enlightened corporate leadership to do more than “what
we can” to develop the region they’re committed to—investing
in things like housing, schools, business capital—instead
of building bigger fences around the decay.
So we need to help communities demonstrate where
the returns will be. In the corporate community now,
there’s a lot of consolidating going on for survival. They’re
connecting rather than competing. The African American
community needs to buy into that model. We’re oriented
to be individualistic: start your own business. That’s not
working. It can’t work in this reality. We have to do the
same thing the corporations are doing—pooling resources
to maximize them. If you bring value, other people will
look at you differently and want to invest because they
see that value.
Securing investment for poor communities is also
going to require a whole restructuring at the community
level of how we market the community. We have got to
get rid of the deficit mentality in the non-profit sector.
Even with the Ford initiative, which talked about self-sustaining
economies and comprehensiveness, it was still
deficit-driven. What I didn’t understand in NFI was the
depth of buy-in to the deficit model by the community.
Initially, I really thought the Ford model created an opportunity
for communities to evolve to another level of doing
economic development, but the community responded to
. . . as important as community participation
and resident involvement are, they’re the
opposite of what economic development is
about. You can’t do economic development
by committee.
Ford’s money the same way they responded to other nonprofit
funding—spend as much money as fast as you can.
Any real long-term impact on the community was a secondary
consideration.
The truth is, as important as community participation
and resident involvement are, they’re the opposite of what
economic development is about. You can’t do economic
development by committee. The corporate structure gets
Looking at Power and Race from the Director’s Chair 35