Empowering Neighborhood People in Washington, D.C.

Over a six-year period ending last fall, the Heartland Center´s innercity community development program trained leaders from 19 neighborhoods in the District of Columbia. Partnering with the Program on Social Change and Development (SC&D) at The Johns Hopkins University, the Heartland Center took its message of community self-help from rural America to the heart of the city housing the nation´s capital. The focus was teaching an asset-based model of community improvement that took neighborhood leaders through a year-long series of workshops and implementation of two volunteer-led community development projects.

Teams this year were from the Fairlawn neighborhood, Petworth/Columbia Heights, and Southwest Hill. Approximately 15 neighborhood activists participated from each neighborhood, with ages ranging from middle school students to senior citizens. The program began in 1992 as the brainchild of Grace Goodell, a Johns Hopkins faculty member who heads the SC&D program. Dr. Goodell said she was impressed with the Heartland Center´s self-development approach with rural communities and thought the same training techniques might work in inner-city Washington, DC. There, she said, people were accustomed to waiting for solutions from the local or federal government, rather than taking action based on the resources already available to them.

"By the end of the year, we heard time and again how much people said they had learned and what additional confidence they had about their ability to make a difference."

Milan Wall, Co-Director

Program participants typically were associated with an organized neighborhood group, such as a community association or housing complex, but had little or no previous experience in working as a team to conduct a neighborhood improvement project. In some instances, their participation in Empowering Neighborhood People (ENP) was the impetus that brought the team members together for the first time.

Teams from three (in one year it was four) neighborhoods went through the program at the same time, providing an opportunity for networking and cross-learning during workshops and comparison of efforts undertaken between workshops. Early in the program, teams attended three 11/2-day workshops. That was changed to five 1-day workshops after evaluators suggested that attendance might increase if the workshops were held on Saturdays only, rather than Friday evening and all day the next.

All workshop costs, including child care and transportation, were paid by grant funds, mainly from the Kaplan Fund of New York with smaller supplemental grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan and the Agnes E. Meyer Fund of Washington, DC. Over the six years, total grant support exceeded more than $500,000. In-kind matching support was provided by Johns Hopkins and the Heartland Center, mainly in the form of uncompensated staff time.

Workshops began with a short course in asset mapping, then proceeded through the Heartland Center´s six-step model for community strategic planning. Interwoven in the curriculum were a number of other topics, including team building, group development and conflict management.

Heartland Center Co-Director Milan Wall, who served as the training team leader for the project, said the most compelling part of the training experience was observing the learning curve of participants over time."Initially, many participants had never led a group meeting, let alone provide leadership for a community improvement project,"he said."By the end of the year, we heard time and again how much people said they had learned and what additional confidence they had about their ability to make a difference."

Some teams struggled mightily to maintain attendance at workshops and the team´s own interim meetings. Even then, however, a core group of loyal activists generally stayed on, learning as much as they could from the workshops and the other teams´ experiences.

Several neighborhoods won awards for their projects, and in one instance, a new coalition of organizations was formed that transformed the way community development projects were undertaken in that part of the city.

Training team members this year included, in additional to the Heartland Center´s co-director, ENP Program Coordinator Abena Disroe and Erin Klett, an SC&D graduate student. Program management in the District of Columbia was the responsibility of Margaret Frondorf, Dr. Goodell´s assistant.

In its current form, the year 2000 was the last for the program. Elements of the curriculum and training approach may re-emerge with other partners in the Washington area in the future and with new sources of financial support.