The Rubinger Community Fellowship has come to an end after five years, having supported more than four dozen community developers in mid-career with funding and professional support. According to the Fellows, the time and space for ideation and experimentation it afforded them were a rare gift, and will continue to bear fruit for years to come.
In the last five years, LISC’s Rubinger Community Fellowship has given 49 leaders working across the field of community development the chance to focus on an emerging idea or pursue a special initiative—from advancing resource-efficient tiny homes as affordable housing in Bozeman, MT, to an anti-displacement project based in the oldest business in New York City’s Chinatown (and spearheaded by its fifth-generation co-owner) to an effort in Georgia putting guaranteed income in the hands of Black women.
Designed to both nurture and celebrate the work of talented community development professionals in mid-career, the Rubinger program has provided each fellow with $40,000 in flexible grant dollars, opportunities to meet and swap insights with their peers, and a platform for sharing their work across LISC’s nationwide network.
“If there’s one thing we understand at LISC, it’s that the leaders of our community-based partner organizations work incredibly hard, day in and day out,” says LISC CEO Lisa Glover. “They carry the justice-seeking project of community development on their shoulders. To move the field forward, they need space to iterate and innovate, and that’s what the Rubinger Fellowship has been all about.”
The program honors the legacy of Michael Rubinger, who stepped down as LISC’s CEO in 2016 after 17 years in which the organization widened its traditional focus on housing and jobs to encompass many of the components that makes a healthy, vital community: from affordable child care to financial coaching to safe streets and places to play. Rubinger helped shape the fledgling field of community development as a young program officer at the Ford Foundation in the early 1970s, and when Ford founded LISC in 1980, he went to work for the upstart organization. In the ‘80s, Rubinger helped lay down the template for what this new entity, a community development “intermediary,” does to funnel capital and technical assistance into under-resourced urban neighborhoods and rural areas.
Responding to questions for a five-year assessment of LISC’s Rubinger program by the Wilder Foundation, Rubinger fellows said they valued the venue it afforded for networking and learning, but especially appreciated receiving the rare, unrestricted dollars that bought them precious time. “It’s having the luxury to do it, to think about it,” explained Dasha Kelly Hamilton, a writer and performance artist who used her fellowship resources to help mount a creative placemaking residency for local people in Milwaukee even as she served as Wisconsin’s poet laureate. As she put it, “I don’t have to lay the bricks as I’m also walking the road.”
Time to think is a luxury, and it’s not one that’s equally available to every creative thinker. The Rubinger program has sought to promote racial and gender equity—the great majority of fellows have been people of color and women—and inject a dose of economic fairness in a field powered by passion and commitment. As one fellow observed, “People who work in this space, we don’t make a lot of money. It’s really hard to take risks to start new things. And we tend to come from backgrounds where we don’t have a lot of financial buffers from our family . . . So I think the [Rubinger] funding is a huge equity component that cannot be overstated.”
Most of the fellows have been nonprofit leaders, but the group of 49 represents a great diversity of roles, from artists like Kelly Hamilton to a Superior Court judge working to scale up a counseling program for young people caught up in the justice system for the first time, and a data analyst laboring to create a digital dashboard to hold landlords accountable for mass evictions and maintenance violations.
The fellows’ work product also includes actionable information. For example, in her fellowship year, Natalia Otero and colleagues painstakingly collected data from nearly 250 survivors of domestic violence in Washington, DC, that demonstrate the critical but often overlooked role that finances play in intimate-partner abuse: more than four in ten survivor respondents said they depend on resources from their abuser.
In many cases, the fellows’ work helped stand up promising local innovations that address inequities fundamental to American society and found in communities across the country. In Los Angeles, for instance, Helen Leung dedicated her Rubinger Fellowship to work on a project to help LA homeowners build well-designed accessory dwelling units in their backyards, and rent them to Section 8 voucher holders, while fellow Jamiah Hargins built up Crop Swap LA, which cultivates microfarms on the city’s lawns and unused spaces and provides their fresh yield for free or at low cost to neighborhood residents. In Richmond, VA, Damon Jiggetts used his fellowship time to develop a bus company that allows kids to take part in after-school activities even if they don’t have a parent free to drive them around; it also employs local people at living wages.
“A morale boost,” one Rubinger awardee said in summing up the competitive fellowship’s value to her progress. Witnessing the fellows’ contributions has in turn lifted the spirits of LISC leadership. “As someone who’s worked in this field almost since its inception, it’s enormously heartening to see what these mid-career professionals are up to,” says LISC president Denise Scott. “The dedication to make change is there. The brilliance is there. Here at LISC we can be absolutely confident that if we water the seeds of community development, they’ll grow and grow.”