A Pioneering Program Offers Graduate Degrees in Economic Development to Busy Nonprofit Workers

TOOLS AND TRAINING

By Jennifer C. Berkshire

MANCHESTER, N.H. — When Joyce Dickens decided to enroll in the National Weekend Masters Program at Southern New Hampshire University’s School of Community Economic Development in 1988, she had a concrete goal. “I looked around my town and saw that there was literally no development on the side where I lived,” she says, describing her hometown of Rocky Mount, in North Carolina’s Edgecombe County. “It was the black side of town, and nothing had been built there for 20 years. I wanted to change that.”

Fifteen years later, Ms. Dickens’s side of Rocky Mount is virtually unrecognizable. The downtown is buzzing with a $2.5-million revitalization project that has brought retail businesses, office space, and community organizations into formerly abandoned buildings. The area is also home to hundreds of new units of low-cost housing. Last but not least, Edgecombe County now has its own “industrial incubator,” a newly built facility intended to foster the development and growth of small businesses and light manufacturing by providing new enterprises with everything from administrative support to below-market leases.

Rocky Mount’s new life is due largely to the work of Ms. Dickens herself, through the Rocky Mount/Edgecombe Community Development Corporation, which she helped found in 1988 and still leads. (This year, she was named Citizen of the Year by the Rocky Mount Area Chamber of Commerce in recognition of her efforts.) But while she had a vision of a vibrant, rebuilt Rocky Mount, she credits her time at the School of Community Economic Development, in Manchester, N.H., with helping to bring that dream to life. “The program really laid the foundation of knowledge for me and broadened my scope of what’s possible,” says Ms. Dickens, who now serves on the school’s board of overseers, the governing body that monitors, guides, and garners support for the school and its programs. “I grew from that.”

The university’s School of Community Economic Development has spent more than 20 years helping activists and nonprofit workers like Ms. Dickens nurture their hometowns. With its hands-on approach to social and political change, community economic development has long been popular in nonprofit circles, but now it’s emerging as an economic specialty. While other institutions offer some courses in the discipline, Southern New Hampshire University is still the only one in the country that grants degrees in the field, according to Michael Swack, who founded the School of Community Economic Development in 1982 and serves as its director.

A Growing Field

The popularity of community economic development can be traced to success stories like Ms. Dickens, says Mr. Swack. Quite simply, he says, it is “one of the only approaches that does work when it comes to helping poor communities. We start from the assumption that something in the community isn’t working. To fix the problem, you need applied skills, but those skills have to be applied in a way that makes sense in your community. Having a theory of change is important, too.”

When Mr. Swack began the program at what was then called New Hampshire College, there was virtually no formal training available in the science and politics of bringing communities back to life. He started small, recruiting a handful of faculty members interested in helping others learn about the business practices and finances of nonprofit organizations in poor neighborhoods. A curriculum emerged, brochures were printed, and to Mr. Swack’s surprise, 38 people showed up for the program’s inaugural session.

Today, the School of Community Economic Development has expanded. It offers a doctorate as well as a master’s degree, runs a program for economic-development workers from other nations that operates in New Hampshire and Tanzania, and plays host to numerous workshops, including one on microenterprise development.

Twenty Weekends

The centerpiece of the school is the National Weekend Masters Program, attracting nonprofit leaders, community activists, and human-service professionals to the university 20 times over two years for a jam-packed agenda of coursework, classroom discussions, and informal late-night chat sessions. Participants, who continue to work in their jobs while attending the program, represent inner-city neighborhoods, rural towns, American Indian reservations and other communities. Roughly 1,000 have graduated from the program since it was established in 1982, the same year that the school was founded.

The weekend students, some of whom travel to New Hampshire from as far as Hawaii and California, pay their own travel expenses. While a monthly trip from Honolulu or even Chicago to New England may sound like an extravagance, tuition for the entire two-year program costs $10,000 — significantly less than that charged by most master of business administration programs.

“Some students get help from the organizations that they work with back home,” says Cathy La Forge, the school’s director of development. “Some use student loans to cover travel expenses, but it is a real sacrifice.”

Last year, the School of Community Economic Development awarded more than $225,000 in scholarships to its master’s and doctoral students, she says, but it’s not enough. “Our greatest need is to have more scholarships for the kind of students who come here,” she says, adding that the weekend program currently has 17 scholarships available for roughly 90 students. Grants from the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, she says, have also helped defray tuition costs.

For most of the students, the last trip home is the most valuable journey. Armed with new tools — and a lot of enthusiasm — they try to apply the lessons of the past two years to their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Those lessons, says Yoel Camayd-Freixas, an associate professor at the school, include not just technical skills but a theoretical grounding as well. “Development here means the transformation of a community,” he says. “There should be some change, some corrective to social inequality.”

Building Communities

Rather than write a thesis, students in the National Weekend Masters Program design and carry out a project in their communities. Typically, the projects are linked to the work the students have already been doing back home. The first two terms of the program are spent planning and refining the projects; the students put them into operation in terms three and four. The last month of the program is devoted to project presentations.

By making the project-design process rigorous, notes Mr. Camayd-Freixas, students are more likely to be successful when it comes time to move from idea to reality. “In their proposals they have to address questions like ‘How are you going to finance the project?; ‘ ‘How are you going to sustain it? ‘; and ‘How will you evaluate it? ‘” he says. “By the time they are ready to implement, they’ve already thought these issues through.” And most importantly, he says, the projects must have an outcome — faculty members monitor the results of the project with an in-person visit.

The project ideas are as diverse as the student body. In the current class of students, projects include plans for a community garden on a Native American reservation. Produce grown in the garden will serve two goals: feeding residents and supplying a farmers’ market, the proceeds of which will fund educational programs, notably language and cultural preservation, on the reservation. Another student, a New Hampshire native, is working with officials in his city to study zoning and property laws in order to address a severe local housing problem: soaring property values that have made it impossible for people who work in New England boom towns to live there. Still another student is establishing a credit union in Hawaii that will function as a “microlender,” making small loans at low-interest rates, mainly to ethnic Chinese residents.

As they plan for the future and dream of more equitable communities, the students rely on both faculty members and their own peers for expert advice.

“There is such an incredible wealth of knowledge and experience that you get from your classmates,” says David Wood, who graduated from the program in 1992 and returns each year to teach, there was someone right there who knew what I needed.” He now leads the largest nonprofit housing developer in New Hampshire — Affordable Housing Education and Development — which had its origins during his studies at the School of Community Economic Development, often referred to as CED.

“The perspective that I got from the program, from thinking about how to circulate wealth in a community, to learning about the traditional elements that a business needs to succeed, has been unbelievably important,” says Mr. Wood, who was one of a small number of students admitted each year for whom experience in community development is counted in lieu of a bachelor’s degree. “I’ve not found anything I learned in the program that was wasteful, unnecessary, or wrong.”

Taking It Home

Many people view an advanced degree as a ticket out of their circumstances — or, at the very least, a way to move up. But for the community economic development students, it has often simply driven their roots deeper. Once their two years are up, graduates from the National Weekend Masters Program overwhelmingly return to the same places — and the same organizations — from whence they came.

“People tend to start where they are and stay there,” says Woullard Lett, alumni-relations coordinator of the School of Community Economic Development.

“When graduates finish the program, they go back home and share what they know.” That loyalty to home, he notes, is not merely a reflection of the kind of people who’ve come through the program over the years, but says something about the nature of community economic development itself. “As you move up through the hierarchy of an organization, you tend to get more distant from the residents, or the clients, or the neighborhood,” says Mr. Lett. “In some ways that’s counter to the spirit of CED.”

While most graduates leave the program ready and eager to apply their new knowledge to the real world, they also cherish the time they’ve spent away from home — 20 weekends of learning in bucolic southern New Hampshire.

“This is a very tranquil place,” notes Sharon Hunt, a former New York welfare and American Indian rights organizer who graduated from the very first weekend-program class and now serves as the school’s director of marketing and admissions. “The activist professionals who come here are extremely dedicated and hard working. New Hampshire gives them a bit of a break from their work. It’s a place without distractions.”

But the time spent out of the classroom isn’t all rest and tranquility. Mr. Wood describes his stint at the school as quite simply “the most exciting 16 months of my life.” Because he lives within driving distance of the university, he could have returned home after class each day, but chose not to. He stayed in a hotel with his classmates. “Staying in the hotel was the best part,” he says. “We never stopped talking and as a result we learned a lot from each other. I met people from cities, people from reservations.” Meeting and learning from classmates like Rebecca Adamson, founder of the First Nations Development Institute, in Fredericksburg, Va., opened his eyes. “She taught us that traditional economic development concepts are doomed to fail on a reservation because they’re not designed to coexist with the culture of the reservation,” he says. “I feel so proud to have absorbed some of that wisdom.”

Despite the loyalty of its graduates — they do almost all of the program’s recruiting of prospective students, notes Mr. Swack — and their success on the ground, the School of Community Economic Development remains something of a well-kept secret. “We’re not that well known,” says Ms. Hunt. “We’re hoping that will change though. We want people to know that something small and beautiful is happening here in New Hampshire.”

Go here for more information about the School of Community Economic Development and the National Weekend Masters Program.

Are you a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University’s School of Community Economic Development? What did you think of the program? Tell us in the Tools and Training online forum.