“A Gateway for Possibilities”: Resident Leadership and Community Ownership

Expanding Resident Voice

Community-based organizations provide essential services to residents. In historically marginalized neighborhoods across the country, they build and manage affordable housing, enroll residents in critical government programs, offer educational workshops, and much more. But regardless of the specific focus an organization may have, they often operate from an aspirational core principle: local residents should be a key force that drives their work. They are the ones, after all, with the expertise that comes from lived experience, and are the people who have the most at stake in reversing decades of systemic inequities and disinvestment.

In this Spotlight for the Institute for Community Power, we look at three leadership development programs designed and implemented by LISC and local partners: Training the Trainers (T4T) in Houston; the Newark Resident Leadership Academy (NRLA); and Community Connectors in Philadelphia. What follows is not a comprehensive evaluation of the programs. Instead, this is meant to serve as a jumping off point for further exploration, identifying some of the key themes and topics that emerged from interviews with participants and tracing some of the impacts the programs had both on participants and their communities.

While the three programs are geographically diverse and distinct in approach, they have similar core features. Participants work collectively in cohorts, learning both from trainers and each other, with a curriculum that includes topics like relationship building, deep listening, the engagement of community members, meeting facilitation, conflict resolution, and the importance of resident voice in shaping local decisionmaking. Participants often have the opportunity to apply these lessons in their neighborhoods, at times through employment at or in partnership with local non-profit organizations or by implementing their own community campaign.

In the past three years, more than 120 individuals have participated in the three programs. T4T and NRLA, in Houston and Newark, are both six-month programs in which participants meet monthly; Community Connectors, in Philadelphia, is an ongoing program in which local CDCs employ residents to engage their neighbors and to complete a six-week leadership course.

In Houston, the Building of a New Social Safety Net

In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped record rainfall across Texas. The torrential downpour killed 68 people and caused more than $125 billion in damage, which was concentrated in the Houston metropolitan area. More than 150,000 homes were flooded in greater Houston alone, with some of the most devastating impacts felt in the African-American and Latinx neighborhoods of Northeast Houston. In one historically African-American community, Kashmere Gardens, more than four in ten homes experienced serious flooding.

At the time of the storm, a new cohort was underway in Houston’s T4T. Some of the participants, like longtime resident Huey Wilson, had already developed a community garden and food pantry in partnership with a local church. In response to Harvey, Wilson and other cohort members, with technical support from T4T trainers, were able to raise $250,000 from Chase Bank to provide disaster relief. While research has shown that disaster relief tends to flow to wealthier communities, they focused their efforts on some of the hardest hit and often overlooked neighborhoods, distributing cash assistance and replacement appliances to 500 households, more than doubling their initial goal.

Wilson recalled that the T4T curriculum had explored how to manage volunteers and build relationships through the slow art of sustained listening. “We were doing lessons on things I needed to apply in the field at the time,” said Wilson. “There were so many people who wanted to be involved.” For Wilson, the training she received was critical in keeping those volunteers organized and plugged into the work. The emphasis on deep listening without judgment or interruption was also key to building relationships among residents who, during Harvey, had suffered extreme trauma.

Becoming a T4T ambassador, or graduate, gave Wilson the skills and experience she needed to help co-found her own non-profit organization, the Northeast Houston Redevelopment Council (NEHRC), which focuses on issues like food insecurity, health inequities, and environmental justice. Today, the NEHRC runs an expanded food program through the Northeast Community Farmers Market, in partnership with Trinity Gardens Church of Christ and Harris Health System. It has also built on the initial disaster relief work done after Harvey by partnering with the City of Houston and the Resilience Cities Catalyst, a national non-profit, to create what is called a “community resilience hub” in Kashmere Gardens. This hub, located in a neighborhood that has been historically marginalized and hit by multiple climate shocks, such as Harvey and a ferocious winter storm in 2021, is a physical space where residents can find services and resources before, during, and after emergencies.

Cultivating Local Leadership in Newark

Wilson exemplifies one of the goals of these leadership programs, which is to encourage and support residents to play more active roles in determining the problems and solutions within their communities, and to bring an increasing number of people along with them.

In Newark, Mary Modlin lives in Fairmount Heights, a historically African-American neighborhood. Before joining the Newark Resident Leadership Academy, she had attended community meetings and occasionally volunteered at her church. After graduating from the NRLA, Modlin decided to lead the Fairmont Heights Neighborhood Association’s education committee, and has spent several years working with local Parent Teacher Associations to organize literacy, parenting, and mentoring activities for local youth.

Modlin is one of several NRLA graduates who has gone on to seek to play a larger role in her community. Another became a tenant association president; one was elected to the PTA. Several submitted their names to run for Newark’s city council and the board of education. “The vision is that you get to a point that you have so many folks who have been through the program that they become their own movement,” said Judith Thompson-Morris, the Deputy Executive Director of Greater Newark LISC.

Not all of the leaders, of course, impact their neighborhoods by assuming official positions. Each NRLA cohort designs and implements a neighborhood action project. During the pandemic, one NRLA neighborhood-based cohort delivered essential care goods to residents, which included toiletries, cleaning supplies, and paper products that had become difficult to obtain. The program, called “Essentially Yours from the Heart,” partners with local businesses, faith-based organizations, and the city council to distribute kits to more than 400 residents on a monthly basis.

In addition to care kits, Ramona Thomas, an NRLA graduate and the Vice President of the West Side High School PTA, launched a baby pantry program to distribute essential supplies and provide support to teen parents as they juggle school and parental responsibilities. Since launching, the baby pantry program has expanded from West Side High to high schools citywide. Thomas cited the relationships she made while participating in the NLRA—between local residents, members of the neighborhood association, and the city council—with making the initiative possible.

In Philadelphia, Ensuring Residents’ Voices are Heard

In Philadelphia, one of the goals of the Community Connectors program is to ensure local community development organizations remain connected to local residents and are responsive to their concerns. Iliana Dominguez-Franco, the former Program Director for Community Economic Development at Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM), noted that “the intense professionalization of the community development field” meant that many community members could be excluded from positions of influence.

The Connectors was meant in part to help push back against this trend. At APM, Dominguez-Franco said, every community project happens with input from Connectors:

They serve as the most effective feedback loop. To get the kind of feedback that you get from a group of connectors is equivalent to a year-long process for each and every project. You have to get out there, survey people, analyze results, and that takes time. With connectors, because they are community members and have extensive relationships in the community we can very quickly find out what people want. We can try something and get just one phone call from a connector saying, ‘Hey, people hate this.’ Connectors let us respond nimbly to community needs.

Derrick Pratt, who went through the Connectors program and also helped mentor new participants, echoed the need for community organizations to maintain a real bond with the community, a bond that begins by acknowledging that residents have insights and by maintaining a healthy dose of humility and curiosity. “We were blessed with two ears and one mouth for the reason that we should listen twice as much,” he said. “Organizations should be listening to people because we work for them.”

Pratt said that he had seen too many groups come out, talk, and then leave, eroding any sort of trust or ability to build lasting relationships. By going out to knock on doors, really listening to residents, and following up, Pratt said the Connectors served an important purpose, but that there was still work to be done. “We have a lot of people who do trust organizations, but the demographic we need to tap into, they don’t look or speak like them.”

The importance of true community representation was also brought up by Sonja Bingham, who went through the Connector program in 2020-2021. She found the experience fruitful but was also frustrated by how many of the “solution-driven” initiatives happening in Philadelphia didn’t include input from the residents who would be impacted. Bingham, who lives in the neighborhood of Kensington, which has a large un-housed population and a high rate of opioid abuse, described one meeting where city officials encouraged residents to approach people who were illegally dumping trash in the neighborhood and explain to them the city policies around trash disposal. “Wait a minute,” she said. “It’s dangerous for us to go up to people we don’t know.” For Bingham, the guidance indicated how out of touch policy makers were about the realities local residents faced.

Looking Forward

Leadership development has no end point and no predestined goal. It can lead newly active community members to join together and advocate for any number of things. In Newark, graduates of NRLA helped push a power company that sought to build a new station to hire locally and invest in new housing and a community center. In Houston, T4T graduates have been fighting to stop the expansion of a freeway that would displace more than 1,000 residents. In Philadelphia, some connectors have gone on to lead organizations of their own. And there is the important work that may never make the headlines: the building of a new neighborhood toolshed; the increasing food security represented by a community garden.

Supporting and elevating leaders from communities that have historically been pushed to the margins is the basic building block for equitable community change. However, as many people interviewed for this Spotlight pointed out, leadership development is not a quick or easy process. It takes time, significant resources, and an ongoing commitment to see projects through. For programs to be successful, they need skilled staff and trainers, robust recruitment efforts, and ongoing support for participants. Significant funding is needed to cover staff and participant time, along with smaller seed funding that enables emerging leaders to launch community projects, such as the essential care goods campaign in Newark and disaster relief in Houston.

As the examples highlighted here reveal, meaningful investments can yield lasting results. In Houston, Newark, and Philadelphia, new leaders emerged to join and strengthen grassroots organizations. Others channeled their energy into entirely new groups. Some ran for public office. Others worked to hold elected officials accountable. Reflecting on the Connectors program in Philadelphia, Iliana Dominguez-Franco summarized the potential for any good leadership development initiative. “It is a great gateway for possibilities, almost endless in the kind of work you can do and how you can impact people. It allows people, wherever they come from, whatever age they are, to discover themselves.”

Find more resources on resident voice and community ownership here.