Since 1993, NeighborWorks America has convened over 15,000 lower-income resident leaders at its annual Community Leadership Institute (CLI). The nation's largest effort to amplify resident voices equips these leaders with the tools, seed funding and network of support they need to drive changes in their neighborhoods.
Attendees have called the CLI "a transformative experience" where they gather to "get re-energized," and NeighborWorks staff have said it embodies their dedication to empowering resident leaders. However, no research has explored the CLI's outcomes, or sought to understand what the resident experience is like, what community initiatives have resulted following the CLI, or how resident leadership has been sustained. Such outcomes could offer lessons not only for NeighborWorks, but for urban planners, community developers and affordable housing advocates building the capacity of — and collaborating alongside — resident leaders.
In "Empowering Resident Leaders: Lessons from NeighborWorks' Community Leadership Institute," a new working paper jointly published by NeighborWorks America and the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, I report on research exploring the CLI's reach that I carried out as a 2019 Gramlich Fellow in Community and Economic Development. The paper draws on conversations with more than 70 resident participants, qualitative and quantitative data from 493 participant questionnaires, a literature review, and case studies of two affordable housing providers, Aeon in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Lawrence CommunityWorks in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where CLI participants later served as active leaders.
Key findings of the research include the following:
- CLI attendees act after their experience: Over a span of five years, 95 percent of CLI teams led a community initiative in the six months following their experience. The most commonly led initiatives are community-building events.
- Far from one-off activities, community-building events often become annual festivals, monthly marketplaces and other sustained initiatives for relationship building and re¬source sharing.
- CLI teams leverage local funds: More than two-thirds of teams engage in local fundraising, and teams raised 2.4 times the funds NeighborWorks provided over the five years. In total, 493 teams raised a total of $2.33 million.
- CLI teams frequently work alongside local partners. Over five years, 493 teams worked with 1,689 partners, and the most common partners and regular financial supporters of CLI teams are nonprofits and local businesses.
- Three factors are critical to sustaining resident leadership:
- Active housing managers who support resident initiatives.
- Opportunities for residents to convene and make decisions with other residents.
- A sense that residents have something to gain from their involvement (e.g., a feeling of belonging or a network of neighborhood support).
While these insights benefit NeighborWorks America — both its core organization and its network of community-based organizations — this research also extends insights to planners and affordable housing developers beyond the NeighborWorks network. In situating the CLI within larger efforts to create resident-driven planning and community development processes, the findings in this research offers lessons in co-producing alongside residents who are often excluded in housing and community development processes.The residents' stories — along with stories told by staff from affordable housing organizations — suggest that a more equitable model of low-income housing is not an unattainable, nebulous goal for the future. It is a reality that resident leaders and affordable housing providers are already undertaking, and a goal that the CLI is actively advancing.
Editor's note: Margaret Haltom is a community-based researcher with a focus on affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. She is currently pursuing a Master's in Urban Planning at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and holds a BA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia.
The Edward M. Gramlich Fellowship in Community and Economic Development is cosponsored by NeighborWorks America and the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Each summer, the program provides graduate-level Harvard University students the opportunity to spend a summer researching a topic related to housing and community development. These projects, and the research papers that result from them, contribute to policymakers', practitioners' and academics' understanding of the field.
