Transitioning Families Out of Poverty

One of the major catalysts when it comes to doing work in under-resourced communities is FACTS. It has always been my personal belief that emotions are simply not enough to sustain the work over time. There is always bigger and more compelling work to do. Furthermore, people who are not engaged in the space simply cannot fathom some of the disparities that exist right outside their door. They tend to be idealized as far-off scenarios that simply do not exist within their very own communities. A few examples of FACTS that have guided our work include:

• While the national unemployment rate hovers near 5.2% and locally near 5.4%, in the zip codes in which LISC Jacksonville is most active, the rate is closer to 12%.

• In the four council districts that LISC Jacksonville does the majority of its work, there are over 61,000 people living in poverty, which represents 41% of the total population living in poverty within Duval County.

LISC Jacksonville’s work in the space of Family Wealth Creation was specifically born out of the above referenced FACTS and the need to address such. While our work alone does not represent a magic potion to get people out of poverty, it does represent a prescriptive approach to giving people back some of the power and dignity that poverty takes from them.

In Jacksonville, Family Wealth Creation for LISC is centered around our work within three areas. First is our Financial Opportunity Centers (FOCs), which are career and financial coaching service centers that focus on the financial bottom line for individuals living with low-to-moderate incomes. The cornerstone of the FOC model is providing these services in an integrated way—rather than as stand-alone services—and with a long-term commitment to helping clients reach their goals, while simultaneously narrowing racial wealth gaps in historically under-resourced communities.

The second aspect of our work around Family Wealth Creation focuses on heir’s property. Our goal here is to help transfer generational wealth by assisting with financial and estate planning, probate, clearing titles, and consolidating property ownership. Our research has led us to discover that heirs face an increased risk of forced sale or eviction, cannot qualify for rehab programs or secure financing for needed repairs, and cannot qualify for loss mitigation programs when facing foreclosure. All of which can lead to deterioration of housing stock or loss of homeownership.

The final leg of our work relative to Family Wealth Creation focuses on home production. While LISC itself is not a developer, our role in creating family wealth centers on our ability to provide the necessary capital for developers to build affordable homes in areas that are underserved. This is of particular importance given that research continuously shows that purchasing a home tends to be the single largest investment that a person will make in their lifetime. To that end, over the next 12 – 18 months, LISC Jacksonville resources will be used to bring roughly 229 affordable housing units to the market, which includes Project Boots.

In the end, we recognize that the work of transitioning families out of poverty into sustainable lifestyles that afford them the ability to have options is not done alone nor in a vacuum. It takes a concerted effort on the part of several entities like United Way, Lift Jax, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, the Community Foundation, the Delores Barr Weaver Legacy Fund and Lutheran Social Services, just to name a few who have come together.

Redefining the “Gentry”

One of the hardest challenges I have faced in my professional career is to conduct systems change. It’s emotionally, spiritually, and physically taxing. Systems are built to sustain a process, and over time as they become more engrained into our collective consciousness, their inability to be moved becomes just as resistant to the forces that would cause them to be altered. Poverty is a system, lack of access to affordable housing is a system, and all the accompanying social ills that give way to negative outcomes all feed into a larger system. 

In creating Project Boots, our collective goal was to look at what aspect of the larger system we could disrupt through our collective work. We understood that by creating affordable housing we have disrupted the grip of systemic poverty, which ultimately gives way to family wealth creation. We also understood that by creating pathways to family wealth creation, we availed ourselves to better educational outcomes. Those educational outcomes ultimately allowed participants a more informed seat at the collective table.  

However, our greatest challenge remained in redefining the idea of who the gentry was and how we would intertwine them with the people that were indigenous to the neighborhood. Therefore, we started with people who were reared and developed in the community (the gentry) and saw their success as a result of – and not in spite of – the current conditions the larger community found itself in. Having them at the table helped us establish a metaphorical bar that we hope will become aspirational for those that are currently there. 

At the same time, we simultaneously crafted programmatic offerings for new residents that met their sociological, ontological, political, and fiscal needs. For example, incentivizing new residents through a matching savings program that will be the seed money for their down payment and closing costs. Program participants must commit to attending monthly workshops that address the aforementioned areas and agree to build their homes in the community.

The state of the indigenous residents was not lost upon us, and how they factored into our collective work was broad and required more of a systems approach because of the varying partnerships. Those partners included, but were not limited to LIFT JAX, United Way, the Community Foundation, the City of Jacksonville, and Goodwill just to name a few. Out of this partnership came a refurbished community market, the Melanin Market, and a home repair program, by which over 100 homes will have some work done to them by 2022. 

Therefore, as you can see, we collectively redefined what gentrification was by simply redefining who we identified as the gentrifier. We redistributed the wealth by starting with those who are indigenous to the community and giving them an equity stake in what was happening on the ground. The conclusion is not written yet as we are still writing chapters to our book. However, we do have a solid work plan that will allow us to build next steps that raise the bar for the future. 

That's My Truth and I AM Sticking to it...

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

The Impact of Strategic Partnerships

Let me start by saying the work of revitalizing distressed communities is HARD. The navigation of issues associated with social detriments that ultimately impact social outcomes is inextricably tied. However, in distressed communities, the consequences of failure can be the difference between life and death. Ask anyone who does this work, and they will have countless stories about the challenges associated with the de-coupling of inter-related social issues that impact distressed communities. However, they will also say that strategic partnerships are essential to producing success.

Further, the challenge with revitalizing the aforementioned communities is poverty begets every other social detriment and one must be prepared to navigate the impact it has before change can begin. Therein lies the work of LISC. By coalescing around people and organizations that are closest to the problem, you afford yourself the greatest chance for success, as suggested by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in his seminal work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This same belief system is what led to the creation of LISC back May of 1980. 

LISC’s approach to revitalizing distressed communities centers around a fundamental systems-change model commonly referred to as collective impact. This approach to revitalization allows LISC, its partner organizations, and the people who are indigenous to the community to develop a common set of metrics, a common dialog relative to said metrics, a common agenda, and a set of mutually reinforced activities that will drive revitalization. In most cases, LISC serves as the entity bringing parties together — a convener of sorts. In action, this looks like the following:

• Working alongside local and state government leaders
• Listening to resident leaders and developing their internal capacity
• Bringing innovative solutions based upon our national scope and reach
• Working to remove barriers that institutional policies have created

Locally, evidence of this process can be seen throughout neighborhoods such as Springfield, Historic Eastside, the Rail Yard District, and Metro North, just to name a few. LISC Jacksonville’s catalytic investments in projects that have served as transformational opportunities for both neighborhoods and the larger city are north of $100 million dollars and $365 million dollars in terms of dollars leveraged.  

North Point Town Center

While the dollars are laudable and speak to the charitable nature of our donors and our capacity to make philanthropic dollars work, the transformation relative to place is just as impressive. Fostering real change and revitalization within our most vulnerable communities takes a collective effort. It is not a singular venture that can be undertaken by one entity successfully. Our quality of life and even our projection of who we are as a city is tied to our ability to develop strategic partnerships for the greater good. The work LISC does in the communities we work in, along with our broad list of partners, simply reflects the success of partnership at its highest and broadest level, achieving the greatest good for our most vulnerable neighbors and communities.

Housing Resiliency is a LISC Priority

Resilience as a scholastic theory has been evolving over the past 70-80 years and has enjoyed a renaissance in the past two or three decades. However, I would argue that resilience as a practical form of survival for under-resourced communities and BIPOC people has always been simply a way of life. Under-resourced communities as a whole have never had the luxury of sitting back and waiting for market corrections to change their outcome. They have always had to have a spirit of resiliency if they wanted to survive.

I would offer it is that spirit of resiliency that has helped LISC as a national organization grow to over 35 markets across the country. However, unlike any other time in our country’s history, resiliency has been tested in every form within the last five years. To that end, LISC Jacksonville, like many of our partners, has taken up resiliency as one of the core tenements that guide our work. On the ground, that translates into three fundamental strategies for us in the area of Affordable Housing:

• Production – We view the work associated with Project Boots addresses this. Project Boots is our bold, audacious plan to work with our local CDC’s and for-profit builders to build homes that meet the demands of essential workers (teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, etc.). It is my belief that we have to make neighborhoods, particularly those north of downtown, destinations to live for the class of workers previously referenced. 
• Preservation – This includes our work associated with home repair. Indigenous people to a community must be supported because they are the fiber and the back story to all that has happened there. Therefore, as a resiliency strategy, we have made home repair a part of our Affordable Housing work.
• Protection – Our work in this area is probably the work I am most excited about because it addresses the issue of heirs’ property and the residential property appraisals and taxation system within some of our most vulnerable communities. It also affords us an opportunity to partner with the University of Florida’s Shimberg Center for Housing Studies and other key partners. 

Over the next nine months, LISC will invest $25,000 in legal services to preserve title ownership and sustain $1 million of assessed home values, which furthers LISC’s Project 10X goal of generating lasting equity and wealth through homeownership.

While the work of LISC Jacksonville is no panacea relative to affordable housing, it represents one aspect of the work that has to be done in the resiliency space. It represents more than the occasional lip service and scholastic treatment that is often levied upon those who live in under-resourced communities.

LISC is Larger Than Jacksonville

There was a quote that I heard recently on a commercial and it suggested that “size was everything.” As I reflect on that and look at the scope of work conducted by LISC Jacksonville, I have to smile and say I tend to agree. I agree in as much as our size has allowed us to partner with the City of Jacksonville to address some of the most pressing issues that face our under-resourced communities. It has allowed us to partner with Fortune 500 companies to deploy capital during the COVID-19 pandemic in an unprecedented manner. Finally, our size nationally has allowed us to leverage and develop a technical resource base that serves over 38 major metropolitan areas and rural communities.

While to a great degree our size does matter, LISC Jacksonville has not lost sight of the humanity our work requires or the directional dexterity that is often required when you are working with some of the most under-resourced communities. I would offer that it’s all those elements combined – size, humanization of the issue, and dexterity – that puts us at the front lines of our work and makes us the go-to partner for resource and programmatic deployment.

To that end, much of the aforementioned is maximized when we as a local office partner with our national team to bring resources and programmatic offerings to Jacksonville, such as the Uber Vaccination Program, which provides rides to vaccination locations at no cost. We have also partnered with Chipotle’s Juneteenth “Round Up For Change” initiative and the Macquarie Group Foundation to garner support for our work around criminal justice reform. These are just a few examples, with much more to come, of how partnering with those outside our county’s borders can have a direct impact in our own back yard. 

In this newsletter, we also address how to leverage the power of our national office in the areas of disaster recovery and resiliency. And yet, all of this is still just a taste of everything that is possible. While size can be relative, I would argue that LISC nationally and locally have maximized our size and abilities to generate an unprecedented level of impact in our under-resourced communities and beyond. And as our community increasingly recognizes the positive, city-wide economic and other impacts of uplifting our most challenged neighborhoods, LISC – both locally and nationally – will continue to play a leading role in bringing the necessary resources to the table to improve the quality of life for our most vulnerable neighbors and our city overall.

Getting to the Root of It

I was recently challenged with the question of how LISC Jacksonville in particular gets to the “root cause” of what constitutes our work. After reflecting a bit, I came away with the belief that we, meaning LISC, would have to have a solution to detangling poverty. While I do believe that there are many smart people within our organization, I also fully understand the issue is far too complex for one organization to have all the solutions. Furthermore, I am a practitioner of systems thinking, which suggest that problems such as poverty are part of a wider social issue.

To that end, LISC nationally has decided to address those “root cause” issues through an aggressive plan called Project 10X. Locally, that translates into three distinct programmatic offerings that reflect our local capacity to alter those issues that lead to generational poverty: Project Boots, Family Wealth Creation, and Financial Opportunity Centers® (FOCs).

First and foremost, Project Boots is our way of creating generational wealth through the mechanism of home ownership. Research is clear that homeownership is perhaps the most common form of generational wealth creation, and we are targeting our LISC-supported communities as the place to start. However, what makes our work so unique is that we are targeting essential workers as program participants.

Secondly, in terms of our work to address other underlying issues that impact generational wealth is our work in the area of Family Wealth Creation. Our goal here is to help transfer generational wealth by assisting with financial and estate planning, probate, clearing titles, and consolidating property ownership. 

Lastly, in our efforts to address “root cause,” we continue to deepen our work within our FOCs, which are career and financial coaching service centers that help low- and moderate-income people build effective money habits and focus on the financial bottom line. Currently, we have three centers in Jacksonville with a goal of adding one a year for the next three years. 

I will be the first to admit that in isolation our work alone will have very little success. The “root causes” are entirely too intertwined with large-scale systemic issues to change. However, when we partner with other agencies and engage in a systematic approach to change, we can get at the source of what holds back our most under-resourced communities.

We will have more to share about these initiatives in the coming months that we look forward to sharing with you.

The “Why” Behind Investments in Historic Eastside

 One of my favorite “live” albums of all time is Frankie Beverly and Maze Live in New Orleans. During one of the intros to his song “Southern Girls,” he states that people asked him why he did a live album in New Orleans, to which he replied, “Why not ya dig.” That response is what comes to mind when I’m asked why LISC Jacksonville continues to invest in Historic Eastside with the Eastside Home Repair Program, discussed in this newsletter, and is launching a program in September called “Project Boots.” 

While the aforementioned quip may be more satire than anything, the reasons for “why” Historic Eastside are both personal and strategic. First and foremost, I spent the majority of my youth being shaped and molded by the community called Historic Eastside, but during my time as a kid we simply identified it as “Out East.” The myriad of families that called “Out East” home reflected a pathway to success for myself and many of my friends. The postal worker lived next to the social worker who lived next to the teacher who lived next to the longshoreman who lived next to the lawyer was a visible possibility of what any of us could and eventually would become.

However, as access become more available to me and many of my peers and disinvestment became more common, what we knew and appreciated became a distant memory, leaving in its wake an aggregation of poverty and all the accompanying consequences. You may ask again why the investment in Historic Eastside and I will simply say again, “Why not?”

LISC’s investments in Historic Eastside do not represent a singular investment in a social program with the hopes that the people will somehow be better. Our investments in Historic Eastside represent a belief in the enterprises that have been tried and true in terms of disrupting the entanglements that poverty and lack of solid investments bring. During the last 10 years, LISC Jacksonville has invested in people, homes, and technical assistance to empower the people who are closest to the issue with the tools to be a part of the change they want to see. We have partnered with organizations ranging from the United Way to LIFT JAX to Operation New Hope to get the work done.

Our latest work, including the Eastside Home Repair Program and soon-to-be-announced Project Boots, represents our latest iteration in terms of getting that done. It represents our deepest dive to date in terms of transforming a neighborhood by making Historic Eastside a destination where people want to live without displacing those who currently reside there. It is LISC Jacksonville’s belief that through a mix of corporate philanthropy, social responsibility on the part market enterprise, municipal policy, and investment we can collectively work together to deliver a product to market that gets east siders back home and becomes a destination for others.

Therefore, I say, when people ask me why LISC Jacksonville makes investments like these in Historic Eastside, I simply say, “Why not ya dig?”

My Confession

Confession…

I 

AM 

Conflicted 

I like everyone else was waiting with baited breath, particularly Black America on the verdict of Derek Chauvin and while I was relived in the sense he was found guilty I found myself conflicted.  Conflicted in the sense that “accountability” is a thing when the life of a person of color is held in the balance.  It’s as if Lady Justice has the capacity to develop a level of spontaneous capriciousness when a black body is involved at the hands of law enforcement. 

Today justice was served, but bills are still past due for Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Corey Jones, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, Matthew Williams and Eric Garner just to name a few.  Further, my conflict lies in the FACT the aforementioned and countless others not named here will NEVER see justice or accountability.   They will only see settlements and Lady Justice will continue on remaining blind, deaf and willfully ignorant to them and their subsequent deaths.  Therein again lies my conflict.  

As I said before I am happy justice was served and I pray the Floyd family has found solace in the fact that someone will be held accountable for the death of their loved one.  However, I have been conditioned to know that neither my degrees, my 800 credit score, my relative good standing in the community, my nomination for an Image Award or anything else will save me if my movements are sudden and an officer of the law determines he or she felt threaten.  In some cases it might not even save me if I am in my own home.  I can just as easily be another name in the platoon of names that look like me who were killed at the hands of law enforcement and no one was ever held accountable for my death. 

My conflict is both real and heavy and is part of the duality I labor with every day. If I am honest it’s the double consciousness that W.E.B Du Bois talked about.  Knowing that I must navigate a dual justice system that has the capacity to turn a blind eye to my cause and call for justice and accountability.  This reality has made me condescending when it comes to verdicts like Derek Chauvin's. 

As I reflect today the system simply worked, but yesterday (Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, etc.) it didn’t and tomorrow it may not especially if there is not a preponderance of evidence to make it.  The burden of proof George Floyd’s death and subsequent Derek Chauvin’s conviction left for others to have to establish simply to get justice is untenable and poses a problem that mutes my capacity to celebrate. Because what I know is that between 2015 – 2020 people who identified as Black (1,480 or 296 people each year over 5 years) were killed by law enforcement and very few of the people involved saw a courtroom.  Let alone a trial.

So pardon me if my exuberance is tempered by a scoreboard that reads them 296 me 1.

That’s my truth and I AM sticking to it…

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen