Last year, MACDC worked hard to secure new revenues for public transportation, which is so critical to many of the residents CDCs serve. The state made significant progress toward meeting the state's transportation needs with the 2013 Transportation Finance Act, which secured an average of $600 million in new funds for transportation. But now that progress is threatened by a ballot question. A group called “Tank the Gas Tax” is likely to qualify a question for this November’s ballot that would repeal the recently-passed law that ties the gas tax to inflation. 

A broad and strong coalition of organizations, including MACDC, has come together to oppose a ballot question that would repeal gas tax indexing. The coalition includes public safety, public health, and consumer advocates, businesses, the construction and engineering industries, and environmental, social justice, and civic groups. 

If the ballot question passes this November, it will cut transportation funding that would be used to enhance regional bus service, make the MBTA more reliable and safer, and improve the safety of the state's crumbling bridges and congested roads. 

What We Stand to Lose: 

• $1 Billion. Gas tax money is constitutionally dedicated to transportation. Without gas tax indexing, we will lose over $1B in the next 10 years for transportation.
• Our Safety.  According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 42% of Massachusetts roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and 43% of bridges are functionally obsolete. Our top ten most traveled, structurally deficient bridges carry an average of 1.2 million cars each day. For the safety of all Massachusetts residents, we need to fix our roads and bridges now.
• Jobs. Losing money for transportation means that we won’t have adequate resources for critical transportation investments that will grow jobs and the economy. For instance, if the legislature had not acted, Massachusetts could have faced losses of up to 15,000 jobs and as much as $11 billion in increased operating costs due to a deteriorating transportation network.
• Momentum for better transportation. Legislators intended to invest significant new resources in our transportation system and spoke of the new law as an important first step that needs to be followed by further legislative actions to improve transportation. Rolling back a significant piece of transportation funding will put a full stop to the momentum that has been built and significantly reduce chances of addressing the remaining transportation funding gap.

Please spread the word to your family, friends and neighbors that this ballot question will move the state backwards.  Ask them to vote “no” in November on this repeal.

For the three dozen Massachusetts CDCs that recently received notification that they are recipients of Community Investment Tax Credit (CITC) allocations, this is a time of challenge – and significant opportunity.

As you certainly know if you are one of those CDCs, you now have until the end of 2014 to get individuals and companies to make highly tax-advantaged gifts to support you and your projects. There are several challenges facing the CDCs attempting to attract these donations:

1. The tax credits are complex to explain. On top of that, there’s a too-good-to-be-true aspect to these incentives, which may make people suspicious. How can you effectively get your message out to prospective donors?
2. CDCs may have some people and institutions in the community who know you and are supportive, but they probably do not think of CDCs as a destination for significant charitable gifts. How can you convert a friend who currently gives you $1,000 to sponsor your annual event into a $10,000 or $20,000 donor?
3. Your community is full of people and businesses who would love to take advantage of the tax credits, but you don’t really know them and they don’t really know you. How can you befriend these possible supporters and get them to commit to a major gift? And how can you do that in such a short period of time? (This feels like speed dating!)

The pressure to get these credits issued within the short 2014 time frame – and to get them issued early enough in the year to allow you to receive more credits in January 2015 – is creating a sense of urgency. But even as you are chomping at the bit to get these gifts in hand, keep in mind both the short-term challenge – to raise a significant sum in a hurry – and the long-term opportunity – to build relationships that can help you next year, the year after, and even after the end of the projected six-year life of the CITC program.

One important suggestion: In your urgency to reach out to donors, don’t rely on sending letters. In-person visits are significantly more effective than mailing out a letter or an email. In-person visits allow the prospective donors to ask questions and to focus on what this program is all about. It gives them a chance to get to know you and your CDC. Letters are fine for routine appeals from organizations people know well and are used to supporting. That’s not the case here. This is an unusual appeal from an organization that probably is not high on the donors’ list of philanthropic priorities. The donors have to get to know you. They can best do that in person.

A second suggestion: Create a plan that both meets your short-term needs and promotes your long-term opportunities. There are two wonderful aspects to the CITC program: 1) if successful, your CDC will get a significant injection of capital, and 2) you have an excuse to build important charitable partnerships in the community. Those partnerships will take some time to develop. So in this first year, depending on your unique situation, you might want to maximize the offer by United Way for (let’s say) up to 1/3 of your tax credit allocation (see graph below), while you patiently go about developing relationships with individuals and businesses.

So take a deep breath. Think both short- and long-term. And get to know people face to face. You’ll find this sort of fundraising more fun than you fear, and remarkably important for the future of your organization.   

Let’s say you are already comfortable with these fundamentals and you are getting started on this six-year journey to significantly improve your revenue model. How do you prioritize between approaching foundations, individuals or local businesses for support?  Importantly, how should you think about using the services of intermediaries such as wealth managers? Below is a simple list of questions to ask yourself.

• What is the likelihood an approach to this prospective donor (or connector to a donor) will result in a 2014 gift?
• What is the likelihood we can build a relationship with this prospective donor that outlasts the tax credit program (i.e. it is not motivated 100% by the tax credit)?
• What is the likelihood we can obtain a sizable gift from this donor without needing to utilize the tax credit allocation?
• How likely is it that this donor may become a connector to other prospective donors – reducing our donor acquisition costs over time?

It would be convenient if you could simply develop a numerical score for these questions, calculate the total and go with the highest score. Of course it isn’t quite that simple because each organization is starting from a different place and with differing skill sets and networks. An organization with a $1M annual budget seeking to raise $120,000 is in a much different place than one with an $8M budget seeking to raise $200,000. Also, to a certain degree you will be guessing about the capacity and interest and motivation of your potential donors. This is not an activity with a lot of certainty.

Nevertheless a few common threads will often surface in addressing the questions. First, while intermediaries such as wealth managers will theoretically expand your donor pool a great deal, they will also act as a relationship filter – or even a relationship wall – between you and the donor. Thus, intermediaries should largely be seen as supports for your short-term or at most medium-term motivations. You don’t want all the clients of well-intentioned wealth managers to cease being donors simultaneously at the close of the program. Second, a foundation is required to make grants each year and as such doesn’t need the tax credit incentive to “get in the game.” The foundation will continue to have this mandate once the tax credit program has ended. There may be a fit for foundation giving in certain circumstances, but be cautious about your approach and clear on why you are approaching a foundation rather than individuals or businesses. A more exciting role for a foundation would be to provide a gift for your campaign but publicly announce its intention to forego the tax credits in order to make them available to donors with state tax liability – a truly charitable act!

By the end of a few years, you will have built up a pool of individual and business supporters who have gotten accustomed to writing significant checks to your CDC – and it is those people who may well continue to support you long after the tax credit program concludes.

Alan Cantor (al@alancantorconsulting.com) is principal of Alan Cantor Consulting LLC and Gregg Davis (gregg@impactconsults.com) is owner of Impact Consults. 

The College of Public of Community Service at UMass Boston was approved, by the Board of Higher Education, to launch a new undergraduate major in Community Development.  Employees of Community Development Corporations, desiring to complete a baccalaureate degree may select the major immediately and may begin studies in the fall 2014 semester.  First-time college attendees and individuals transferring credits from an accredited institution of higher education are encouraged to apply.

Students in the major will take core community development courses and choose a concentration in either community health or economic development.  The College of Public and Community Services anticipates adding more concentrations as the program develops.  The Bachelor of Arts degree combines theory and history of community development; technical skills in research and community analysis, Geographic Information Systems (GIS); skills in leadership and organizing; and community development principles and practices.

Graduates of the program will find employment in various fields, in the public and private sector, and in such jobs as a Community Organizer, Health Education or Economic Development Specialist.

“It was important to create a major to meet the community development demands of the 21st century that prepares students to promote and facilitate comprehensive development and community empowerment,” said Anna Madison, Dean of the College of Public and Community Service.

To see the required courses or download a fact sheet about the program, visit the CPCS website: www.cpcs.umb.edu

To apply, visit www.umb.edu/admissions. For further questions, email communitydevelopment@umb.edu or call 617.287.7175.

The College of Public and Community Service is located in the Wheatley Building on the campus of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA.  The college forges partnerships with public agencies, community organizations, and labor organizations to build healthy, safe, sustainable communities.

Last week, the Massachusetts Legislature voted to allocate $15 million for the Brownfields Redevelopment Fund in the Commonwealth’s Supplemental Budget.

“The Brownfields Redevelopment Fund is a vital resource for communities across Massachusetts as residents seek to clean up polluted sites in their neighborhoods and transform them into places where people can live, work and play,” commented MACDC’s President Joe Kriesberg. “$15 million is a strong start toward fully recapitalizing the Fund. We look forward to working with the legislature over the coming months to secure additional funding to keep cleaning up the Commonwealth.”

The Brownfields Redevelopment Fund is designed to support the cleanup of vacant or underutilized properties where environmental contamination prevents development or reuse, by providing both interest-free financing for environmental assessments and flexible loans for the environmental cleanup. Since the Fund was created by the Legislature in 1998, it has made 630 individual awards, totaling over $78 million. Over the past five years alone, the Fund supported the creation of 2,551 homes, 2,242 construction jobs, and an additional 2,191 jobs, expected to be created by fund borrowers. The fund was fully depleted in June, 2013.

As of April 2013, MassDevelopment had 26 projects that will receive funding only if the Fund is recapitalized. MACDC and its allies seek a total of $60 million to fully recapitalize the fund, even if it takes more than one year to achieve this level.

A cross-section of leaders convened at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Wednesday, January 15, 2014 to celebrate the Working Cities Challenge, a community development initiative for Massachusetts' smaller cities with a twofold goal:

1. To advance collaborative leadership in Massachusetts' smaller cities;
2. To support ambitious work to improve the lives of low-income people in those cities.

From the 20 applicants, six cities won a total of $1.8 million to support projects that adopted a cross-sector and systems-changing approach to human and economic development. The winning cities were Salem, Somerville, Chelsea, Fitchburg, Lawrence and Holyoke. At the center of five of the six winning applicants were Community Development Corporations, each taking the lead on community engagement within their city's neighborhoods.

"We are pleased to see CDCs participating in these coalitions as we believe this sort of cross-sector, collaborative work represents the future of community development," commented Joe Kriesberg, MACDC's President. "The fact that CDCs are playing a prominent role in five of these cities is not a coincidence, but rather evidence of the vital role that CDCs play in comprehensive community development."

Community development corporations involved in winning Working Cities Challenge Grant teams include: Lawrence Community Works (Lawrence), Twin Cities CDC (Fitchburg), The Neighborhood Developers (Chelsea), North Shore CDC (Salem) and Somerville Community Corporation (Somerville).

The City of Lawrence was awarded $700,000 over three-years for its plan to change the way its school system interfaces with the larger community by focusing on the direct correlation between a family's economic and employment challenges, and student success rates.

"LCW is delighted by this recognition of the positive changes afoot in the City of Lawrence," said Jessica Andors, Executive Director of Lawrence CommunityWorks. "We are excited to work together with the schools, and our outstanding nonprofit and employer partners, to address the direct connection between families' economic challenges and student success. This will be a true team effort and we feel that as a community development corporation, we have a vital role to play in bringing parent voices and institutional partners to the same table."

The City of Fitchburg, along with Twin Cities CDC, was awarded $400,000 over three-years for its eCarenomics Initiative, an effort to develop shared metrics for neighborhood health and well-being with the goal of making the North of Main neighborhood a place where residents can thrive.

Marc Dohnan, Executive Director of Twin Cities CDC remarked, "We are thrilled to be recognized by the Boston Fed. We are fortunate to have a great partner at the City, wonderful leadership from Mayor Wong and lots of hard work and effort from many organizations, but in particular the Montachusett Opportunity Council, which is serving as the backbone agency for the initiative. This could not have happened without the work of so many residents of the North of Main Neighborhoods, who have worked so hard to make their neighborhood a better place to live, work and invest."

Chelsea and The Neighborhood Developers received $225,000 over three-years for their Shurtleff-Bellingham Initiative, designed to engage public, private, and nonprofit sectors in an effort to reduce poverty and mobility rates by 30% in this struggling neighborhood.

The City of Somerville, along with Somerville Community Corporation, was awarded $100,000 in a seed award toward their proposal to reduce unemployment among low-income youth by creating new, youth-targeted workforce development systems infused with mobile technology and social media.

The City of Salem and their lead partner, North Shore CDC, was awarded $100,000 in a seed award for their plan to bring one low-income neighborhood's economic indicators in line with rest of the city by focusing on four issue areas: economic development, small business development, workforce development, and leadership development.

"We are grateful for the support of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Working Cities Challenge Grant funders. This support will enable our team to implement the Point Neighborhood Vision & Action Plan, a community-driven plan poised to bring major economic development and opportunity to Salem," said Mickey Northcutt, CEO of North Shore CDC.

Two teens from Viet-AID's High School Peer Leadership Program will have a very exciting, real-life experience in civic engagement this spring, helping the City of Boston make decisions on how to spend real money.  In creating the last budget of his 20 years in office, Mayor Thomas Menino set aside $1 million for capital projects to be allocated entirely by youths.  The City has signed an agreement with a non-profit organization called the Participatory Budgeting Project to help launch the Youth Participatory Budgeting Process.  According to the City of Boston's statement, starting in January and running to July, youth from all parts of Boston will come together as a steering committee to "identify projects to improve their communities, vet those projects, consider trade-offs, and vote on how to spend the $1 million." Last fall, the City posted an open invitation to all young residents, youth groups and other organizations to apply for membership on the Steering Committee.  Viet-AID was very fortunate to have two members of the Youth Program selected to this committee. As peer leaders of Viet-AID's Leadership Alliance (VALA), Tony Nguyen, a junior year at John D. O'Bryant High School, and Vicky Nguyen (no relation to Tony), a sophomore at the same school will serve as youth representatives on the steering committee. "This is a very exciting opportunity for the young people personally, and for Viet-AID as well," said Carro Hua, who is the Youth Leadership Coordinator and Americorps Massachusetts Promise fellow. "Tony and Vicky will gain a hands-on civic experience along with their other peers as they will also participate in the general participatory budgeting process and as the process unfolds, we will have the opportunity to witness the important impact to our neighborhoods led by young people." As of this writing, the Youth Participatory Budgeting Steering Committee will have had its first meeting, launching this groundbreaking program. When the program concludes later this year, decisions will have been made on a million dollars worth of tangible improvements in the City of Boston.  We at Viet-AID are so pleased to know that our young people will have played a part in developing those plans.

“We applaud President Obama for making income and wealth inequality a central theme in his State of the Union Address. We agree that growing inequality is harming families across this country and threatening the long-term health of our economy, our democracy and our way of life.  Our members are working to help families by engaging them in efforts to improve the neighborhoods and communities where they live and work. We believe that confronting inequality among families requires confronting inequality among places – that means eliminating blight and spurring investment in our lower-income neighborhoods. It means providing safe and affordable homes, helping to start and to grow businesses and expanding local jobs. It means creating safe neighborhoods where parents can raise a family.  We know that local residents and stakeholders are already doing the hard work to build and sustain such neighborhoods.  We need the federal government to be a partner in these efforts and welcome President Obama’s efforts to create and support those partnerships.”

Learn more about what CDCs are doing Massachusetts.

MACDC members,

Here it is!  The first ever NOFA for the Community Investment Tax Credit.

Please note that DHCD will be holding an informational session at our annual meeting in Worcester on Friday, November 15.  If you have not yet registered please do so on our website.

PS - If you are not yet a DHCD-certified CDC you still have time. DHCD has generously given you until December 10 to submit your certification application.

PPS - Don't forget to check out MACDC's CITC resources.

Have you ever tried explaining what your organization does only to sound like you’re listing items on a menu?  “We have this program and that service….”  “Oh, and did I mention we run a loan fund for small businesses and provide supportive housing for the elderly?”  If you’re not careful you can sound like the “Jack of All Trades, Master of None."  If you don’t have a cohesive narrative, anyone listening to you will just become confused and tune out.  The question you need to answer before you respond to any question about what your organization does is – “What is the constant central theme that defines why I’m here?”  Once you can answer that in a sentence, you’re on the road to clear engagement.

Start with the people that you’re directly working with and don’t go too far astray.  For example, you can say, “Our organization was founded by the area’s residents to help lead the community’s revitalization.  We focus on building homes, commercial space and helping the residents with job opportunities and career advancement.”  That sentence might not fit your organization exactly, but I’m not saying “We provide services ranging from x, y and z.”  I start and end my statement with what’s most important to us: How we work with and champion a community and its residents.

Oftentimes, I also like to engage people by talking expressly about why CDCs, for example, are so different from each other.  CDCs should be instruments of redevelopment for each community in which they’re working.  Communities have different needs from each other, or at the very least have different emphasis on similar needs.  While one community may be continuing to address the foreclosure crisis, another community may have large vacant factory spaces.  These two organizations could be working within adjoining communities and still have significant differences in focus.  Use this to stand out a bit and talk about how you’re responding to the needs of your community specifically.

Finally, a cohesive message is only as good as the messenger.  Make sure that ALL staff, ranging from property managers to accountants, know how to present the organization.  It is not good enough if only the executive director or communications director can effectively talk about the organization  

Nonprofits, in general, and CDCs, specifically, can be tough organizations to define and to explain.  A CDC grant writer will tell you that it can seem like well-crafted butchery fitting an organization’s purpose into a 2,000 character text box in an online application.  Take the time to really think about how you can concisely present an accurate description of your organization that doesn’t sound like a list of items on a menu.  Be engaging, direct and to the point.  At the beginning and end it should be about people and how your organization helps make change happen by being a central resource that local people use to transform their community.

To read more about this topic, check out Joe Kriesberg's post "Is there a common theme that unites the CDC sector?"

CDCs are leaders in tearing down walls, literally and figuratively, and creating communities where ALL people can live with dignity while participating in and benefiting from our economy.  This is the ideal vision of what CDCs are striving to achieve.  But most people don’t have the faintest clue who we are or what the acronym CDC means.  The general public’s understanding of a CDC, if they have one at all, most likely is centered on affordable housing.  We, as a field, aren’t very good at telling the public what we do.  Why we do it. What we’re doing and what we’ve done.

Let’s start with acronyms. What is a CDC?  Well, of course, it’s the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.  So are we handling Ebola strains in super-hermitically sealed labs?  No. If you search Google with the term “CDC,” we’re not even a Wiki entry on the first page, or the second, or the third.  The CDC acronym for our field doesn’t work by itself.  This means that you have to KNOW what CDC means in order to begin to get the results in Google relevant to our field.  The problem is worse than this one acronym because we have multiple acronyms just in our names:  NDC, NHS and CED.

Next is the statement “affordable housing” and how it applies to our field.  Do CDCs get involved and lead significant affordable housing projects in their community?  Sure.  But we aren’t affordable housing groups exclusively.  There are many organizations that are producing and preserving affordable housing. The term by itself is inaccurate to describe a CDC. It also can paint an ugly picture in people’s minds about what we do.  Affordable Housing often is associated with big government and gray tenements.  We don’t want to define our field with negative mental associations.  Finally, no one should talk to someone outside of our field or real estate development in general of housing units.  It’s a term that’s cold and used for budgeting and planning purposes.  Leave it there.

Then how do we explain to people what it is that we do effectively, clearly, concisely?  Obviously, this is a hard and complicated question to answer, but we must change the way the general public relates to our work if we want to attract new people to it. I’m not going to answer the question completely in one post, but we can start with the power of a quick defining statement and how it can effectively be used to tell our story a bit more clearly.

MACDC is a big acronym that says what we want to say to elected officials and people involved in our work, but absolutely nothing to anyone else.  It’s why we have adopted a statement that captures what we do without any acronyms and without talking about affordable housing:  “MACDC is an association of mission-driven community development organizations dedicated to creating places of opportunity where ALL people can live with dignity while participating in and benefiting from our Commonwealth's economy.” I can start a conversation off with someone who doesn’t know the field and not get stuck with stereotyping, negative connotations and perplexing acronyms.  This easily leads me into giving examples just about everyone can immediately grasp:  supporting fisherman on the Cape, cleaning up Brownfield sites, creating thousands of new homes across the state and helping families of all backgrounds compete in our economy.  People like hearing about all of this.  AND people relate to what I’m saying immediately.

CDCs are leaders in tearing down walls, except when it comes to sharing with the general public what we do and why. Let’s free ourselves from these language puzzle boxes and get out there and let people know what we do and why.

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I want to hear from you and what your CDC or nonprofit is doing to overcome these communications challenges.  We’re always looking for better ways to express what it is we’re up to as a field.  Post comments here and let’s get the conversation going!