The Community Development Innovation Forum

Over the past forty years, Community Development Corporations and their partners in the Community Development field have achieved remarkable success – building homes, creating jobs, developing leaders and transforming lives and communities. This track record and the significant infrastructure that we have established positions us to tackle some of the most vexing problems facing our negibhorhoods and communities. At the same time, our success can also be a weakness as we confront new challenges and opportunities  and seek to expand and deepen our impact. There is a risk that we will rest on our laurels and assume that what has worked in the past will work in the future.  Models and strategies that worked in the 1980s, 1990s or even the past few years may not be the best models for the coming decade. CDCs and their partners must adapt and respond to the rapid changes facing our field – changes in real estate markets, demographics, public policy, philanthropy, non profit management and finances, financial markets, communications technology and a coming generational shift in the leadership of our field.  

The Community Development Innovation Forum is a process sponsored by MACDC and the Boston office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) to engage a robust and thoughtful process to identify specific opportunities to advance innovative practices that will enable the field to most effectively respond to these changing dynamics.  The Forum intentionally includes all stakeholders in the field – CDCs, funders, lenders, policy makers, consultants, academics, and other partners – to ensure that our thinking is reflective of the entire field and our solutions have broad support.  Specifically, the goals of this effort are two-fold:

·         To be a forum for innovative thinking about the future of the community development field in the state.

·         To generate practical ideas and strategies that the field can implement to increase its effectiveness and be more responsive to changing community conditions.

The Forum will be seeking the following outcomes:

·         To articulate the changing nature of community development work and develop a vision of future practice for the field.

·         To identify the key opportunities for innovation in the field.

·         To organize projects that develop new practices, products, capacities and systems to address today’s social justice and community development challenges.

The Forum is structured to be inclusive and transparent, while also enabling committed individuals to do the essential work that is needed to advance this agenda. The Forum includes both task forces charged with doing work in specific areas and broader convenings to ensure widespread awareness and participation. The details of the process are described in the materials from our Kick off event on June 11, 2008. Click on the links below to read those documents.

Funding to support the Forum work has been provided by The Boston Foundation, the Hyams Foundation, and the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.