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  

The Cost

As a generality I would venture to say black men never want to be martyrs.  However, the almost daily public execution of black men has created martyrs of many men without their permission.  The frequency at which this is happening, I am embarrassed to say, has rendered me numb to the news of another black man’s death.  See at one point, a small part of me used to die when I heard that a black man met his death in a senseless manner and it somehow got blasted into my consciousness.  I would spiritually, intellectually and emotionally mourn his passing as if I knew him, when in fact our only connectivity was race, gender and the news.  I would chide the collective community for what I considered our collective carelessness and normalizing his death because I wanted to live, and no matter who he was or what he did I am sure that on his worst day or in his worst moment he did too. 

 

Fast forward to now and my spirit has intersected with the Law of Self Preservation and the Law has won; which suggests that I cut off that which may harm me, and the weightiness of black men dying is a lot to bear. Now you add law enforcement to the mix of participants, and the ask becomes entirely too much.  At least for me.  What’s more grim and heavier relative to law enforcement is the movie-like appeal their role in the death of black men has taken on (Cops = Good Guys, Black Men = Bad Guys).  The implications and permanence of good guys versus bad guys and the death of said bad guy being uploaded almost daily to my psyche has created a cycle of social confusion that I just can’t/refuse to carry around. 

 

I would venture to say death at the hands of those who may have some real or imagined beef is one thing, but layer in those who took an oath to protect and serve and it becomes akin to the Chinese torture method of lingchi (death by a thousand cuts).  Therefore, as a means of coping I chose to mentally check out and preserve ME instead of waiting and watching while I die a spiritual and emotional slow death. 

 

This is not to say I have become or intend to become any less of a conscious objector to the spiritual, intellectual and social genocide that is playing out before me.  I just had to make a choice and the frequency of those thousand cuts made me rethink my collective actions.  What does that mean or what does that look like I am not sure, but what I do know is it doesn’t look like me clicking on or watching every tragic story about a black man dying.  I simply don’t have room at the inn for that.  

 

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

 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

 

904Live.com

Truth as I See It

The discernment of truth from fiction has never been as arduous a task as it seems to be these days.  Outside of the human element to flower the truth, the flowering of the truth as manufactured by artificial intelligence has made discernment and truth seeking a conscious task.  So much so that there are articles that focus solely on “Best Practices” for discovering the truth. 

Imagine the work one must go through in every aspect of his or her life to get to the point of making intelligent decisions based upon facts.  Also take into account that according to research humans make upwards of 35,000 decisions a day.  I don’t know about you, but I want to have some universal truths around certain aspects of my life.  I want to believe without much thought that the food that I eat, the air I breathe, the institutions I depend upon (government, religious, etc.) are operating with my best interest at heart and truth is at core of those entities.

I frame this particular musing in light of truth because what the recent protesting has brought to bear is how many of my white brethren have been vested in facts that simply are not grounded in truth.  See what the deaths of Armaud Arbery, George Floyd and Brianna Taylor’s death has shown white people is the ghost of race and racism that black people see are real and are not just figments of a time gone by.  It has made plain that people of color complaints of a systematic ideology based solely upon the color of one’s skin can both be a cause of death and or an economic barrier. 

However, if there was a silver lining to the issues of today is the fact that when I look at the front lines of the revolution there seems to be a shared responsibility in terms of moving humanity forward.  Which brings me back to truth.  What the revolution has further done is made my white brothers and sisters look in the mirror and juxtapose the untruths their parents have been raised to believe about black and brown people against the truths they as young adults have grown to know for themselves.  It’s hard to justify death and systematic inequality when you see it in real time and right before your eyes.  

While white supremacy spun at its unconscious normal rate the pandemic slowed the world down to a crawl.   Making the entire world acknowledge separate and unequal treatment, particularly here in America.  While a resolution is still TBD that will quell the Negrophobia that has gripped the country for over 400 years what is happening now makes some of us hopeful.  At the very least it gives those that went on before me solace that at least the revolution moved from Soutel to San Marco and from Auburn Ave to the doors of CNN.

That’s My Truth and I AM sticking to It…

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen