Continued...

Which Way Forward?

Going forward, the field needs to answer these questions: Can we get more accomplished with multiple voices? How can the community development field be repositioned? Is it possible and desirable to mobilize these groups into a national constituency? Is the field getting what it needs in way of support given its fragmented support system?

Ben Hecht, president and CEO of Living Cities, believes that it is a healthy and natural evolution of a sector to have multiple associations representing it when the organizations in it are so diverse: “When you try to centralize all organizations in one place, you reduce the voices at the table. The centralized organization gets more professionalized and more narrowly focused. Those that feel left out will create their own platform. This allows for the seeding of new ideas and the pruning of older, dead ideas.” However, Hecht points out that this is not a substitute for leadership: “No one is thinking about the field as a whole. However, given that there are really three different types of nonprofit housing organizations active today [CDCs with a small geographic or specific client focus, metropolitan/regional nonprofit housing organizations, and national nonprofits]. It would be difficult to have just one association to provide this leadership, because the agendas and world view are so different.”

Roberto Barragan believes that associations must be relevant to their communities and that associations that serve a specific constituency better represent low-income communities of color. He too is not convinced that the community development movement needs a national CDC association analogous to NCCED in its prime.

With the growing diversity in the CDC field and the overlapping roles among associations and intermediaries, Barry Zigas, former president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition and Fannie Mae executive, says it is hard to imagine one national organization representing all the needs of the field. Zigas notes that public housing authorities (PHAs), on the surface a more unified field, have a trade association, but in the past two decades separate associations have emerged for large and small PHAs.

Bill Kelly of SAHF agrees that a single association for the field is not desirable: “If you bring too many people under your umbrella, it becomes harder and takes longer to reach agreement, and you frequently end up with the lowest common denominator position on policy issues.” Kelly does point out that it does make sense for groups to come together around specific issues where their views are likely to be consistent or where policy makers are pressing the field for unanimity.

Tom Bledsoe, president and CEO of the Housing Partnership Network (HPN), believes that while the field encompasses many different business models, it is generally aligned on mission and would be stronger if it spoke together on certain issues, such as financial reform and CRA. He cites several examples of how the field has recently collaborated successfully on policy issues, including the LIHTC coalition. He says one key to success is having a group that can provide staff resources to coalition efforts, but stays in a facilitative role so buy-in from everyone is not imposed from the outside.

Debra Schwartz, director of program-related investments for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, says that it will be important to evaluate recent examples of how organizations have worked together on legislation, such as LIHTC and TARP. “Maybe the answer isn’t having one big association,” she notes, “but getting groups access to money to quickly catalyze these efforts in the future, so when we need to bring 15 groups around the table, it can happen. There may be ways to be more deliberate about supporting these collaborations; right now it is totally ad hoc.”

But not everyone thinks collaborations and coalitions are the way to go. The National NeighborWorks Association (NNA), a trade association composed mostly of NeighborWorks organizations (but distinct from NeighborWorks America itself), is currently, in partnership with other national housing and community development advocates, launching a practitioner-led initiative to explore creating a new organization to be the unified voice for community development. Dave Brown, executive director of NNA, makes the point that other housing interests, primarily real estate agents and public housing authorities achieved significant success with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“stimulus” dollars) by presenting a unified voice. The leadership of NNA thinks the time is right to appeal to the leadership at HUD and focus on expanding federal housing and community development resources. They are proposing the creation of a new organization called Practitioners Leveraging Assets for Community Enhancement (PLACE) and are working to build a constituency for this new organization.