The National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) has launched a three-year assessment of the health of the community development field—a critical undertaking for our industry if we want to get the right resources to where they are most needed. Shelterforce, along with the rest of us, is tracking the project, and spoke to LISC’s Mark Kudlowitz for a recent article highlighting new information about the financial plight of community-based development organizations.
The below excerpt was originally published by:
Community Development Field Is Resilient, But on the Edge
By Miriam Axel-Lute, Shelterforce
How many community-based development organizations (CBDOs) are there, how are they doing, and what are they getting done? Those are questions advocates for the field haven’t have had good answers to for at least a decade.
“We are always trying to understand the state of the CDC field,” says Mark Kudlowitz, senior policy director from LISC, a national intermediary organization that works with community-based development organizations. “It’s been difficult, sometimes to advance resource provision in the absence of data.”
The National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED), an industry trade group that ceased operations in 2008, produced five different “census” reports of the community development field, based on extensive surveys, between 1988 and 2005, but there’s been nothing equivalent since.
To fill that need, last year the National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) launched Grounding Values—an ambitious three-year research project to bring our understanding of the state of community-based development organizations up to date. Working with Urban Institute as the research partner, the project has an advisory group with representatives from most of the major national networks and intermediaries in the field. (Disclosure: I participated in this advisory group. This article, while it interviews members, was produced independently of NACEDA and the advisory group.)
The first phase of the project, whose results were published on Aug. 31 and released at a virtual NACEDA summit on Sept. 15, is a review of the financial health of CBDOs based on IRS form 990 data, primarily from 2018 but also in select years from 2001 to 2019, to examine changes over time. Relying on IRS data limits the kinds of information you can get significantly, but it lets the researchers include many more organizations, including some that closed their doors in that time period.