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I have a public confession to make: I once worked for the New Community Corporation of Newark, NJ. Actually, I worked twice for them: 10 years as a development office, and another half year as an info tech assistant. Oh, I also volunteered for them for 2 years and was a part-time consultant for another 6 months. All told, I had 13 lucky years in and about the New Community empire.
What the heck is New Community, you ask? Well, it’s an urban community development corporation, probably the biggest one in the nation. It builds and rents housing to low-income people, provides job training and social services, runs two charter schools, provides pre-school programs, supports a credit union and other financial services, and runs various small businesses that provide jobs in the low-income neighborhoods of Newark. Sounds great, huh? A place with a mission led by a man on a mission, the Monsignor William J. Linder. Father Linder was the founder of NCC, and remains the grand poobah to this day.
Linder started NCC with a group of parishioners back in 1968, right after the riots in ’67. Since then, New Community never stopped growing. The New York Times and other big media just love it; they’re always doing articles and stories about NCC as the light of the ghetto, the organization that thrives in the crime and drug-ridden neighborhoods that strangle public schools, mom and pop stores, public housing, and anything else that tries to stay alive down there. Since the early 1960s, almost every government effort to make things happen in those neighborhoods has failed; but at the same time, Monsignor Linder’s crew has taken a lickin’ and has kept on tickin’. They gotta be doing something right!
Yea, the good Monsignor and his right hand man, Ray Codey, have done a lot of stuff right, and people interested in urban poverty aren’t wrong in admiring them. That is, until one of them thinks to ask a rather blunt question: if NCC knows how to combat poverty so well, why are there still so many poor folk and mean streets in Newark (and increasingly in the cities surrounding Newark, as if an infection were spreading). Why didn’t the Census poverty rate go down in Newark from 1990 to 2000, despite NCC’s continued growth and the economic revitalization of downtown Newark? Why do increasing numbers of Newark youth turn to street gangs for hope, versus NCC’s many avenues of opportunity?
A rude question, not often asked. The New York Times and its cronies have been too polite thus far. But NCC is getting a whole lot of public money (more than two-thirds of its revenues come from state or federal sources) and you’d think that the press might start asking whether the public is getting its money’s work from NCC (and it’s many imitators).
In my opinion as a former insider, the biggest problem at NCC is that growth has become king. The #1 goal at NCC is to keep on adding new buildings, new programs, and new grants. That is definitely the Linder-Codey doctrine. Question it, as some thoughtful management people did over the years, and your job security takes a nosedive. The official NCC motto talks about personal dignity and improvement of the neighborhooods, but the undisputed prime directive is growth. If you want to keep your job, you don’t stop and ask, “just what do the poor people in our area really need?”
And that’s a shame, because a place like NCC could really prove to be a useful bridge between the policy wonks who affect the big decisions in DC and the poor themselves. Right now you’ve got a number of think tanks dedicated to poverty issues and governmental responses: the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, the Joint Center for Poverty Research at the University of Chicago, the Urban Institute, the Ford Foundation, and various state-level groups such as the Rutgers University urban issue groups in New Brunswick and Newark. These are interesting places where academians and grad students crank out studies about the effect of social policy on crime, teen pregnancy, use of welfare benefits, unemployment, etc.
On the other side of the coin, you’ve got the community development corporations and other service agencies struggling away out in the ‘hoods, fighting for every dollar, trying to expand or at least make the next payroll. And for the most part, nothing connects these two worlds. The academians pretty much stick to national issues such as federal welfare policy or low income tax credits or HUD public housing directives, and don’t really pay too much attention to the non-profit agencies that have the most contact with the poor and their communities.
By that same token, service agencies like New Community put their blinders on and focus solely on what they have traditionally offered their clients, be it housing or emergency shelter or day care or drug rehab. They don’t often think about the overall mix of outside influences in a poor person’s life, e.g. police procedures, welfare rules, public school problems, food stamps, taxes, incomprehensible paperwork, etc. Only the academians up in the ivory towers have the luxury to ponder how those things interact and study what kind of responses they generate. Those who could really watch it all in action (people in the service agencies) don’t have the time, and those who do understand the bigger picture (the academic types) seldom go out to actually look at it. Bottom line, we don’t have many people who can really analyze and understand what it’s like to live in urban poverty. No wonder most of our programs to help the urban poor have done so poorly themselves.
I have a modest proposal to offer here. But before I do, let me focus once more on my experiences at NCC, an organization claiming to touch the lives of over 50,000 poor people each day. During my years there, we had occasional contacts with the thinking crowd; academic studies did take place regarding NCC and its clientele. But these studies had to be pre-approved by the big boss. And that meant that a complimentary product was expected. Despite having a Ph.D. himself, Monsignor Linder was not a big fan of academic freedom. Not in his backyard.
Again, the prime directive to all who worked in the front office (as I did) was growth. We were not encouraged to stop and discuss the lives of those we served, or the various forces that touched them. We were not to think about whether welfare was a disincentive to marriage, or whether competitive school vouchers would improve the inner city public schools, or whether gangs were actually rational economic choices for young male dropouts. We were told to get to the next grant, get the next building constructed, and get the next new program going. This despite the fact that we were concerned and intelligent people with college degrees and often graduate training.
OK, so we didn’t have the academic or political credentials that would get us into the Institute for Research on Poverty or the Ford Foundation. But we rubbed elbows every day with the subjects of their studies, even if most of us did not reside amidst them. You’d think that we could be of some use to the ivory tower dwellers. But they didn’t seem interested, and the big boss wasn’t interested either (unless it would somehow add to his glory).
So, I have a proposal – just a dream, I have no way of making it a reality. I foresee a hybrid organization, a cross between a research institute and a community-based service agency. In this organization, the staff would be responsible to provide services to the urban poor, and simultaneously participate in quality studies that document and help understand the poor and how they can best be helped. I would take a group like New Community or one of its many imitators and convert it from a high-growth organization into a learning organization.
Instead of continuously seeking partnerships with government agencies and businesses to garner resources for new service ventures, the new hybrid would seek to work closely with academic groups for on-site, un-biased studies of a variety of issues affecting the lives of the urban poor. These studies would be open to conclusions that went against the agency’s immediate interests (e.g., a study of HUD’s Movement To Opportunity program might show the benefits of moving poor families our of inner city housing like that run by New Community and into suburban areas with better schools and job prospects).
Instead of exclusively seeking grants for more buildings and new programs, this hybrid agency would learn to harvest funding for studies and policy papers. Every staff member would be encouraged to consider themselves research associates, from social workers to accountants to housing managers to day care teachers to grantwriters to career counselors. They would participate in carrying out studies and voice their opinions and look things up and get interested in the bigger picture of urban poverty. They would be responsible to learn more about the poor and the community every day. In other words, they would be quasi-grad students of all ages, expected to put hard work into their learning and research. Overall, such an agency would help the ivory tower people to get real, and help the people who deal with the real to see the bigger picture.
The end product? A cadre of young and middle-aged professionals with a better understanding of the urban poor and what can really be done to help them in spite of our American political realities. They would work together with formal academians and policy wonks to help the public understand the inner cities and help our leaders institute more effective urban programs and government actions.
Of course, I have a vested interest in presenting this dream. I want to work at such a place! It would really make my life complete. For now, though, I don’t believe that this place exists. Oh well … we all have our dreams.