Forty people sit in a circle. Most are residents of Crown Heights, a dynamic, culturally rich neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn that is too often defined by one fateful week in 1992 when racial tensions exploded and the community erupted into three days of violence.
On that Sunday afternoon in September, the spectrum of people who came together included a young Jewish man who had moved to the neighborhood just a month before and an African American woman who has lived there for sixty years. All were there to answer the key question, “What is our shared vision for Crown Heights?”
Over the next three hours, they built community, talked about moments that made them proud to live in in their neighborhood and named the challenges they saw preventing everyone who lives in Crown Heights from thriving. Last, suspending skepticism, they imagined new solutions.
This is Brooklyn Community Foundation’s new Neighborhood Strength model at work.
Neighborhood Strength is a resident-led investment program that brings community members together at the neighborhood-level to identify, and direct funding to, solutions that target significant local challenges.
We chose to start this work in Crown Heights, where we moved our offices in 2014. Crown Heights is one of Brooklyn’s largest communities of color, home to Weeksville, the first free Black community in New York State, and to thousands of immigrants from every corner of the Caribbean. It’s also home to the central headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. More recently, with rapid real estate development surging throughout the neighborhood, Crown Heights has become ground-zero for Brooklyn’s struggles with gentrification and displacement.
As a neighborhood undergoing rapid change in the face of long-standing structural issues and a unique demographic landscape, Crown Heights presented us with an opportunity to build our resident-led investment work in a place that could lead to a new model for communities across Brooklyn.
Neighborhood Strength began in 2015, steered by a small advisory council of local residents, nonprofit leaders and small business owners who collectively identified four challenges – tenants’ rights, policing, youth opportunities and cross-cultural relations – and structured an RFP to support projects led by residents and local nonprofits. The council distributed $100,000 through 12 grants ranging from $5000 to $15,000.
As the foundation contemplated the next phase of Neighborhood Strength, we pushed ourselves to think beyond the limits of traditional grantmaking and ways we could create a much larger, lasting impact. In 2016, we changed our approach to focus on including the voices of many more residents to dramatically affect one key challenge.
The new model is built around a creative inquiry approach grounded in the pedagogical principles of “design thinking.” Design thinking challenges participants to reframe problems as open-ended questions for exploration. The process includes three stages of engagement:
Neighborhood Landscape Analysis: Demographic data, current/future trends and interviews with key community stakeholders
Neighborhood Visioning Sessions: A three-hour process that includes community building, identifying key challenges and a rapid ideation session in small groups to generate solutions to those challenges.
Advisory Council Working Sessions: The final stage presents the ideas generated at the visioning sessions to an expanded Advisory Council of long time community leaders, residents, business owners, community organizers and block association members.
The Neighborhood Visioning Sessions have been the cornerstone of this strategy. Over the course of this fall, we hosted three sessions open to all Crown Heights residents and people who work in Crown Heights. Each visioning session was held in the neighborhood at a community nonprofit and was thoughtfully constructed to minimize power dynamics and create authentic community and conversation.
We intentionally hosted the visioning sessions in different locations within the community, instead than hosting them at the foundation offices, to strengthen a sense of community ownership. Also, staff did not attend the sessions to allow for the most honest conversations amongst participants, knowing that a foundation presence can silt or sometimes silence more candid conversation.
One of the things that we did not anticipate was the way that the neighborhood visioning sessions would inspire people to form their own groups and develop new projects. After attending the first visioning session and working in a small group around solutions to public space, a participant decided to develop an online network for sharing resources and now she’s a member of our advisory council. Another participant decided to begin hosting monthly dialogues in her café.
Over the course of the three sessions, each attended by an average of 30-35 people, a number of themes came up again and again:
- A need for more effective communication funnel ensuring that more people know when community events are happening.
- A way to acculturate new residents to the social norms of the neighborhood. There was an emphasis on things like saying hello to your neighbors and learning the history of the community. This seem to be tied to a desire to preserve cultural heritage in the neighborhood.
- A sense that much of the new development in the neighborhood did not reflect the culture and history of the community, which created a sense that people were not welcome and did not belong in the new eateries and shops.
- A desire for shared public space that is welcoming to everyone, aesthetically in tune with the history and culture of the community. A space that could be used for a range of purposes like resource exchanges, a marketplace for small businesses and artisans, workshops and community health services.
Three “big solutions” emerged from these sessions (public health, public space and small business development) that is underpinned by the need for cooperation and self-determination.
This month and next, we enter the final phase of this work: intense discussions among members of the Advisory Council about the dominant themes and the ideas.
In two months, we expect to present a plan to Brooklyn Community Foundation’s board of directors to initiative a new funding commitment in one of these areas that will hopefully spark even greater community engagement and leadership opportunities as we move to make a vision for a stronger Crown Heights a reality.
Kaberi Banerjee Murthy is vice president of programs at Brooklyn Community Foundation. Piper Anderson is the founder and chief creative strategist at Create Forward and designed and leads the Neighborhood Strength initiative. Follow @BklynFoundation and @PiperAnderson1 on Twitter.
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