In this episode we talk with Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire, a national leader on creating wealth and wellbeing for people of color, with a particular focus on Black communities. Dr. Queen Nazaire currently serves as a Senior Advisor for PSG and as a Senior Fellow at PolicyLink. She is the co-founder of Black Gravity, a collaborative focused on closing the racial wealth gap, and co-founder of Builder’s & Benefactors, a community of Black private equity and venture capital investors. Dr. Queen Nazaire wrote one of the closing essays in our What Works volume on mixed-income communities. She used her essay to introduce the person-role-system framework as a tool for promoting racial equity. We talk about practical ways to turn racial equity intentions and goodwill into actual everyday actions.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

JaNay Queen Nazaire.2020.The Person-Role-System Framework as a Key to Promoting Racial Equity

In this episode we talk with Dr. Tiffany Manuel, President and CEO of TheCaseMade, a strategic consulting firm that helps leaders build the public will to intentionally tackle the issues of systems change, equity and inclusion. Dr. T, as she prefers to be called, authored an essay for the What Works Volume that argues that strategic casemaking is critical for how we engage public audiences about poverty, place and race. In our conversation we explore specific examples of shaping public narratives that engage people across different identities, backgrounds, and geographies.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Tiffany Manuel.2020. How Do Fish See Water? Building Public Will to Advance Inclusive Communities.

The Bay Area Housing Justice video highlighted in the Podcast

In this episode we talk with Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez, Assistant Professor at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and Research Affiliate with the National Initiative of Mixed-Income Communities. Dr. Rodriguez co-authored as essay for the What Works Volume with Majeedah Rashid that applies a Black feminist lens to the issue of mixed-income community development. In our conversation we examine the tension between community development and community organizing and Dr. Drake Rodriguez introduces us to the notion of Black feminist-centered organizing as an approach to navigating this tension. She describes the specific case of Nicetown CDC on the north side of Philadelphia as a case of Black feminist-centered community organizing in action.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Akira Drake Rodriguez.Majeedah Rashid.2020.Black Feminist-Centered Community Organizing as a Framework for Developing Inclusive Mixed-Income Communities: Nicetown CDC’s Village Network and Outreach Initiatives in Philadelphia

In this episode we talk with Frankie Blackburn and Bill Traynor of Trusted Space Partners, a consulting firm they created in 2011 to promote what they call community network building, a highly effective way to strengthen relationships and build social support across lines of difference. They work with resident leaders, real estate executives, property managers, service providers and others to design and advance creative approaches to shift the operating culture in organizations and neighborhoods. In this conversation, they talk about the community building philosophy and techniques that they have been deploying in mixed-income development efforts around the country. They provide specific examples from their work with the Trek Development real estate company in Pittsburgh.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Frankie Blackburn.Bill Traynor.2020.A Call for Property Management Transformation to Meet the Challenges of Mixed-Income Communities

Trusted Space Partners website

In this episode we talk with Salin Geevarghese, President & CEO of SGG Insight and Founding Director of the Mixed-Income Strategic Alliance. Salin served for most of the two terms of the Obama Administration as a senior leader in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His perspective on promoting comprehensive community change is particularly interesting given his wide-ranging professional experience across the corporate, philanthropic and public sectors. We recorded this conversation as the Biden-Harris transition team is deep into its preparations to take office, so Salin’s perspectives on lessons learned from the Obama Administration’s efforts to advance place-based strategies are particularly timely. We discuss his lessons learned about advancing place-based efforts in a more cross-silo, cross-sector and cross-jurisdictional way. We also touch on his perspectives, as an Indian-American, about advancing racial equity in the U.S., given how this topic can often be framed as a Black-White issue.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Salin Geevarghese.2020. Reflections on the Role of the Federal Government in Promoting Greater Urban Equity and Inclusion.

Salin Geevarghese.2020. Washington Post. How I found my identity as an Indian American in a Black and White country.

In this episode we talk with Dr. Clinton Boyd, Jr., a Postdoctoral Associate at the Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Dr. Boyd is a rising young scholar who is building an expertise on the subject of black fathers. In our conversation we touch on a wide range of topics including our personal journeys as Black fathers, the undervaluing of Black men in general versus the idolizing of Black male athletes and entertainers, and what Clinton has learned from his research, including the Dads2Kids home visiting project. Clinton and Dr. Deirdre Oakley of Georgia State University co-authored an essay for the What Works volume on the role of Black fathers in mixed-income communities.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Clinton Boyd, Jr. and Deirdre Oakley.2020. Untapped Assets: Developing a Strategy to Empower Black Fathers in Mixed-Income Communities

In this episode we talk with Hans Buder, founder of the Moving to Opportunity Fund, an innovative social investment fund with a focus on changing the lives of young children by helping their families move to neighborhoods with high-performing schools. Hans has been an elementary school teacher with Teach for America, an investment banker, and has worked for a large affordable housing developer. The MTO Fund has a double bottom line mission of putting kids from low-income households on a path to college and delivering market-rate returns for mainstream investors. Hans’ vision is for the Fund to ultimately impact thousands of low-income families without any government financing. The Fund recently purchased its pilot inclusionary property in Dallas.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Hans Buder.2019. The MTO Fund: Harnessing the Market to Promote Opportunity and Inclusion

In this episode we talk with Ben Metcalf, former senior official at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, and now Managing Director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California Berkeley. In his essay entitled “California For All: How State Action Can Foster Inclusive Mixed-Income Communities,” Metcalf wrote about how he and his team worked with Governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom to pass legislation and create programs to reduce barriers to creating affordable housing in high resource communities. In this conversation we hear about the innovations implemented on his watch and his lessons learned.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Ben Metcalf. 2019. California For All: How State Action Can Foster Inclusive Mixed-Income Communities

In the first episode of Bending The Arc we kick things off with a conversation with Dr. Amy Khare, the Research Director at the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities. We explore the challenges and opportunities of creating more inclusive and equitable neighborhoods. We review some of the insights and ideas from the volume of essays on mixed-income communities we have co-edited together.

National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities

What Works to Promote Inclusive, Equitable Communities Volume Website

Amy Khare and Mark Joseph. 2019. Prioritizing Inclusion and Equity in the Next Generation of Mixed-Income Communities

Bending The Arc explores the everyday work of creating inclusive, equitable and racially just communities. This podcast spotlights bold thinking and action by creative, passionate, experienced thinkers and actors from cities and communities around the US and Canada.