Improving Neighborhoods: Mistakes Grant Makers Often Make

When Lucille Gorham peers out the front door of her row house, she sees crumbling

vacant homes, needy kids, and corners where the local drug trade is plied — examples of the crushing poverty found in her East Baltimore neighborhood, and in several others in the city.

When Annie E. Casey Foundation officials look at those neighborhoods, they see the same thing.

But any agreement between the two ends there.

Ms. Gorham, a neighborhood leader for more than 20 years, says that a Casey-led program originally designed to spend millions of dollars on creating new leaders, connecting families with jobs, and getting residents working toward solutions to their neighborhoods’ problems pushed aside established groups in favor of new ones started with the help of Casey money. Making Connections, a program started by the foundation three years ago in Baltimore and 21 other cities, lives on in 11 cities, but Baltimore isn’t one of them.

“They ignored us and other groups that had been working here for years,” says Ms. Gorham. “It was a slap in the face.” Adds Glenn L. Ross, president of another neighborhood association nearby: “Casey was pressured out of the community because it didn’t understand the politics here. If you can’t understand the political game, you won’t get nothing done.” Troubled by the foundation’s approach, leaders in three of the four neighborhoods involved in the program told residents not to open their doors to survey-takers tied to the program, Mr. Ross adds.

Annie E. Casey Foundation officials deny they shut out neighborhood voices. The foundation says it has changed its approach, however, and has switched to other programs to help the city that is the site of the grant maker’s headquarters.

The foundation’s experience here exemplifies the challenges grant makers confront when they attempt to include residents of downtrodden areas in neighborhood-improvement projects. Distrust, skepticism, and fear that a foundation might impose its will or the interests of the powerful remain obstacles that architects of community-building programs must overcome.

Residents, foundation officials, program leaders, and experts say that those devising such programs should keep the following issues in mind when drawing up their plans, lest they get off on the wrong foot with those they try to serve:

• Make sure the program doesn’t clash with local politics. Karl N. Stauber, president of the Northwest Area Foundation, in St. Paul, says that the grant maker’s 10-year, $200-million commitment to residents’ groups in a dozen poor towns in the upper Midwest and Northwest does not include organizations that won’t share power. “During our early exploration phase, we have had community leaders who have said, ‘You have to do this through our political structure,’” says Mr. Stauber. “Our approach is more inclusive than that, so we decided not to get involved there.”
• Make sure an area is ready to make a program work. Mr. Stauber urges grant makers interested in funneling money and sending staff members into neighborhoods to work hard at understanding the ability of residents to change. When the Northwest Area Foundation discovered that neighborhoods in Yakima, Wash., were too divided by geography and racial attitudes, it pulled out of a collaboration it had started there.
• Expect skepticism. Paul Bauknight Jr., president of the Northway Community Trust, a collection of residents’ groups and other organizations working to improve health in poor sections of north Minneapolis, says foundations should factor in such skepticism when making plans that involve impoverished areas. “You can’t really blame people for wondering about these community-building programs,” says Mr. Bauknight. “Let’s be frank. This is an experiment.”
• Don’t be surprised by apathy. Along with being skeptical, residents who have previously been asked their opinions and taken part in rounds of foundation-led neighborhood meetings may view community-building programs as having “the flavor of the same old soup,” says Mr. Ross, who has embraced the Casey Foundation’s presence and the more than $300,000 it has granted to programs in his East Baltimore neighborhood. “People are poked, prodded, and surveyed to death. They get tired of it.”
• Be modest about the program’s ambitions. Richard C. Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute, an applied-research think tank in Bethesda, Md., says that foundations make a mistake when they walk into a neighborhood as if they own it. “Foundations that act like they have all the answers deserve to have the door slammed on them,” says Mr. Harwood, whose group is using a $2.4-million grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to develop neighborhood collaborations in Flint, Mich.
• Be sensitive to existing programs. Mr. Harwood says that foundation money can actually hurt neighborhoods. Sometimes, infusing new programs with large sums of cash can crowd out successful, small-scale neighborhood efforts that have been around for a while. Large amounts of upfront grants can also raise expectations too high, or force foundations and their grantees to expand programs before they are equipped to, Mr. Harwood says.
• Choose the right leaders. Douglas W. Nelson, president of the Casey Foundation, says that foundations run the risk of “anointing leaders who put artificially prominent voices out in front of the community.” He urges those behind resident-run projects to do the proper research into neighborhoods and who might best lead them. Marguerite M. Johnson, vice president for programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., adds that national grant makers should consult with local foundations when it comes to picking leaders.

Mr. Nelson says that, despite some past resentment from neighborhood groups over its choice of leaders, Annie E. Casey Foundation’s involvement in Baltimore continues. The grant maker plans to spend as much as $8-million to supplement a relocation fund started by the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the local government for the estimated 1,300 people who may be forced to move to make way for a biotechnology center the hospital is building largely with government support. Mr. Nelson acknowledges that the foundation runs the risk of being perceived as pushing the agenda of the hospital, which has long been unpopular with many of its neighbors.

“It’s a problem we appreciate,” he says. “But because of our involvement, people will end up better housed and better supported.”

And, says one neighborhood leader whose group was formed with $3,200 in start-up money from the foundation, better informed. Pat J. Tracey says she and some of her neighbors asked Casey for help because groups such as Ms. Gorham’s had not kept residents apprised of the biotechnology-center plans. She credits the grant maker with becoming more sensitive to the intricacies and intrigues of the neighborhood.

“They’ve redefined what they’re doing while they’ve had to listen to this negative dialogue,” says Ms. Tracey. “And they’re still here.”