2023 Rising Star in Community Building Awardee, LaVonda Henderson!

Congratulations to LaVonda Henderson, Director of LinkSTL Inc., recipient of our 2023 Rising Star in Community Building Award!

The Rising Star in Community Building Award recognizes a person who:

• Demonstrates strong dedication to and passion for community building work.

• Exhibits leadership, vision, and a commitment to action and results.

• Shows promising potential to catalyze outstanding impact in community building policy, investment, and/or community change.

• Works to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with LaVonda to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what LaVonda had to say.

I reached out to my grandmother who was part of Communities First-STL. And I was like, “Linda…” (Yes, I call her Linda). “I want to mentor these kids. I want to be that parent or that person who’s missing from their lives. I want to give back and be there for them.” She said, “I want you to meet these ladies whose office is next door.” That’s how I started volunteering for LinkStL. I told myself, “I can see myself doing this. I would love to do this.” The organization began with Michelle Duffe, a property developer in Hyde Park, and Timetria Murphy-Watson, the first director, when they wanted to bring resources to residents, and especially to youth, in this small pocket of town. It seems like everyone overlooks Hyde Park.

Well, I was learning the ropes when the following year they said, “We want you to sign up as an AmeriCorps VISTA for Links.” I was like, “What is that? I’m not going into no Army!” But now I know it’s this wonderful program where if you ever want to try to do a job but you’re afraid to do it, this is where you need to go. It’s a fun type of Army, I guess you could say. It’s a cohort of folks who get together, volunteer, and fight for the same cause, which is understanding and beating poverty. So I got a stipend and worked there for about two years.

Then they were like, “We really like you. We want you to stay.” So they came up with a budget and kept me on as staff working on programming and outreach. Well, it got to a point when people would come in and ask, “Where’s LaVonda?” The director would introduce herself and say, “What’s up? What you need?” And they’d be like, “No, I need to talk to LaVonda. Where’s LaVonda? Tell her to call me.” I was like, “Why they always coming for me?” But I was their ear. And it would get so personal. When I talked to them, I’d tell ’em, “You trippin’. Get it together. We’re gonna come up with three steps, work on those steps, and you’re gonna move on from there.” They’d leave the office or get off the phone and then get themselves together. Some called me all night long and I had to be like, “Look, I have a life.” But, I had answers for what they were going through.

When I see the finished results of a project or a smile on a family’s face or the thank yous from late-night calls, that’s what warms me up. Our motto at LinkStL is, “Linking people to possibilities.” Think about the word link and how many ways it can be used and that’s everything we do. We’re that piece that always starts that chain, that gate, that well, that map.

I run into families with a lack of resources or lack of education and when I try to tell them how or when to do something, I’m fighting the system and it’s like I’m fighting them too because they’re so prideful to let somebody know they need help. I tell them, “When I sign you up for this program and send you over to these people, I need you to pack that attitude in the car, go in, and let them know how much you need, when you need it, what you need, and how much you need it. Don’t just tell them your lights are getting cut off and you need help turning them back on. They can’t help you if you’re telling half of your story. No. Tell them, ‘My lights are getting cut off because I just lost my job. I’m a single parent of four kids. I catch the bus everywhere I go. I don’t know how I’m getting my next job.’ Tell them exactly what’s wrong and I guarantee you they’re gonna help you with the most present need in your life.”

I’ve sent folks to programs that have been able to get them cars to get them to good jobs and they got on their feet and got the things their kids needed. I was able to help families sign up for 100 Neediest to get things for their households. One family whose house caught on fire lost everything. The mother had three kids and just had another baby. She was so amazed, she couldn’t believe someone she didn’t know gave her so much support. I was in awe, too. In this program, you can get a check and get adopted or get a check and not get adopted. She got both. Her check was like $1,500. I was like, “Girrrrl! You’re buyin’ me lunch, right?” Then she went through all the gifts for each child and over $500 worth of gift cards. She kept saying, “Thank you.” I told her, “Don’t thank me. Figure out a way to thank them.”

Xavier and his family are part of the reason why LinkStl got on the map. He stayed up on 14th Street with his mom, dad, and sisters. That was one of my little babies. He meant so much to me. One day when he left our office, he was shot after getting his hair braided. Well, I also stay in this neighborhood. And when I got that phone call, I got in the car and just ran. I was like, “Where is he?” I went to the hospital and he was gone. His sisters still call me or pop up out of the blue, like, “Where you at? What you doin’? Miss LaVonda, we need our hair braided.” I have a cousin who does hair, so every school year they braid their hair. But that little baby made me want to try to help figure out how to help these little kids in my neighborhood here. See, he was shot by two young men by accident because they were shooting at each other. I grew up around gang violence. I knew a bunch of gang members and reform members. And if they were shooting, it was in the wee hours of nighttime when everybody was in the house. So what happened to Xavier kinda pissed me off and it really hurt me. He was my youngest son’s first friend. And my son couldn’t understand that he was never gonna see this boy again.

When people refer to neighborhood and community, I think about when I was a kid and grew up on Fair and West Florissant. I couldn’t go acting a fool down the street because Miss Taylor and all those other folks in the neighborhood would call my grandma. We grew up knowing everybody and knowing we were safe. So I always want to bring that concept back to where I live now. My grandmother, Linda, was really involved in the community back then. Team Sweep was an organization that used to go to different neighborhoods and bring supplies to help keep them clean. Every Saturday morning, there were 20 or 30 of us dressed in these bright green shirts, cleaning up and getting made fun of by gang members and other little kids. But, when that yellow bus pulled up Friday night to take us to the baseball game, all those kids were ready to join.

When people refer to neighborhood and community, I think about when I was a kid and grew up on Fair and West Florissant. I couldn’t go acting a fool down the street because Miss Taylor and all those other folks in the neighborhood would call my grandma. We grew up knowing everybody and knowing we were safe. So I always want to bring that concept back to where I live now. My grandmother, Linda, was really involved in the community back then. Team Sweep was an organization that used to go to different neighborhoods and bring supplies to help keep them clean. Every Saturday morning, there were 20 or 30 of us dressed in these bright green shirts, cleaning up and getting made fun of by gang members and other little kids. But, when that yellow bus pulled up Friday night to take us to the baseball game, all those kids were ready to join.

So because my grandmother signed me up for that as a kid, I understood what it meant to keep the community clean and why it’s important. She also made me mentor the younger kids, so I knew what it was like to have someone to look up to. She was part of a political party, so I used to go canvas at 12 years old, advocating for people. She used to put us in youth job programs, so my first job as a freshman in high school was as a librarian, shelving books and marking old books they were going to sell at the book sale at the end of the year. After that, I worked at Care Optical helping folks try on eyeglasses and putting their contacts in and I loved it. I loved being around my people, working, and just having fun. So if it wasn’t for my grandmother, Linda Primer, and all her mess, I would not be here.

I really do love what I do. I enjoy it every day. And when I do get youth to work with me from St. Louis Jobs Board or SLATE, I’m on ’em but I’m not on ’em. And I’m not on ’em because they should be having a little fun. I teach them how to work in community, how to be the face, and how to be held responsible for other people in life.

Since I’ve been asked to be the director at LinkStL, and I accepted, my vision with my board members’ support is to work around youth. And when you work around youth, you get the families, because the kids go home braggin’ about how much fun they’re having. They talk about how I corrected them on such and such behavior and then the parents come to me saying, “They told me about that. How can I get help for this and this, too?” That’s how you then bring in the families, get to know them, and learn how to better serve them.

That said, LinkStL has been open for eight years and we’ve had some form of a summer camp for seven. Last summer, we decided to have a camp from the last week of school until the first week of school from 7:30 in the morning to 5:30 in the evening. I got 65 kids enrolled. But on a typical day, we had 30 to 45 kids. And I learned all these different behaviors and feelings a child could have. I already knew they were little, itty-bitty grown people. But I started seeing how much things at home really affect these kids. 

Parents tell me all the time, “They don’t know what I go through!” And I say, “Yeah, but do you know what they are going through?” Hey, I say it as a parent as well. I tell them, “I yell. I fuss. I scream. I cuss. But do you know whatever you’re goin’ through, your kids are going through it, too? They just don’t know how to say it. They might not know what the word ‘struggle’ means, they just know Mommy’s mad.”

Monday through Friday, kids came in for summer camp. They had breakfast, we did self-meditation and stretching, they’d run around and play. And by 9 o’clock, it was time to start the curriculum. It could be tutoring in reading and math, art, or speech and debate. We offered cooking, dance, photography, self-reflection poetry, and yoga. They loved going swimming at The Y twice a week. The kids loved that the bird sanctuary came out with all types of birds. The kids were like, “So these birds just gonna poop all over the floor or what?” I was like, “They don’t have a bathroom like us. This is the bathroom!” Everybody was like, “Well, I’m not gonna clean it up.” The man who visited was like, “It’s alright. I got wipes.” We had Mad Science come out to do all types of wild experiments. We had a chef come who didn’t just teach the kids recipes, he taught kitchen safety and the kids had to pass a kitchen safety class before they could start cooking. So funny. So cute. And they all got certificates of completion.

I was in charge of the crafts, so one day the kids made fluffy, fairy flip-flops. I thought only the girls would want to, but the boys wanted to make pairs for their sisters and their mamas. They just loved to participate. Then when we started with the beads, they made bracelets, too. But craft time wasn’t just to share how they could do something on their own or take an old pair of raggedy jeans and turn them into something new. It was a time when we conversed. We talked about what was goin’ on with them. We sang songs. We were goofy. It was a different way to sneak therapy in to get them to open up and all talk. We’d have tons of conversations. And it would change their mindset even in the way they talked to each other.

I also got donations of books, toys, and snacks, so we created a store inside the camp. The kids were able to win and lose money, which went into another curriculum we got funding for about financial literacy. So I was the banker, I had this bank book, and they would deposit and take out money. They each had a pencil folder to keep their money and checks in there. When they went to the store, prices were ridiculous for a pencil, but the concept was, “Do you really need this item or do you need something else?” At the end of camp, there was so much left over, I let everyone have some items for free and purchase whatever they had left in their bank accounts. They went home with so many goodies: shoes, pants, soap, lip gloss, sanitizer, books, calendars, and art supplies.

And what did you get out of it?

Headaches. Tears. Plenty of lupus flare-ups! I was here from 7 AM to 6 PM every single day. I ran myself ragged. But, you can love on somebody else’s child just as much as you love on yours. What you do will reflect on how another person lives. I got relationships and bonds that I can have forever.

LinkStL has a staff of one. And that’s me. So if I can have two or three more people working here, our work will get out a lot more and be even more phenomenal. We’re in need of supplies and funding now for after-school and summer camps. The parents of our kids donate, but they’re also wondering, “What else can we do? Who can we talk to? Do we need to knock on the mayor’s office? We like what this organization does and it’s not like anywhere else.” Maybe their kids have programming at their schools, but these parents keep choosing to support us. They wanna advocate for us. My crazy self doin’ something right. With more funding, I’d have someone doing programming or grant writing. This job experience has been such a learning curve for me and developed me as a director. What I’ve learned here, you can’t just learn in the classroom. You have to be hands-on. We’re still involved in annual family events, like Spooktakular, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And we’re building out our after-school and summer camp. We want it to get to the point where it’s like, “Sorry, we don’t have enough room.”

The old me was afraid and lost. I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. The new me, I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid to approach somebody and ask for help, to say, “I need this. My kids need this.” I have changed tremendously from who I was, personally and professionally. We hear the saying, “Treat people how you want to be treated.” I always expect them to treat me the same way, but then I’d get upset when they didn’t. My grandmother, Linda, told me, “God sees what you do.” So I continue to treat people how I want to be treated. Maybe they’re not gonna give it back to you, but He is. And I’ve been able to give my kids opportunities I couldn’t before. I’m able to see my role in life and understand it more, and not feel like, “Why the hell am I here? What am I doing this for?” I’m not a kid anymore. I’m here for every kid that don’t have anybody to fight for them.

Your support does not always have to be in dollars. It would be wonderful if it was because then we can do what we need to do. But your support in advocating or telling our story or coming to volunteer or dropping off a few bags of groceries helps. The kids are happy when they’re able to have a hot meal or have a hot meal catered or have something other than a sandwich. And when they’re fed better, they act better. How are you when you’re hungry? Evil. Grumpy. Mad. Can’t think. Can’t concentrate. So that’s what I’ve also learned.

What is a tremendous need that would help you along with what you’re doing and trying to accomplish?

The big fat “F-word.” Funding! That’s the only problem I have. Because if I had the proper funding, I would have staff members all year round. The kids would get those familiar faces. The kids already get that from me. They know where I live. They’ll say, “Miss LaVonda, I saw you go in the house last night.” And I’ll say, “Well, did you make sure I got in safe?”

— Lavonda Henderson, Director of LinkStL Inc.

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like LaVonda at our Community Development Family Reunion event on April 20th!

CBN Announces 2023 Community Building Awardees!

Join us April 20th from 5-8pm at the Intersect Arts Center to celebrate this year’s community building champions at CBN 11th Annual Community Development Family Reunion! All of this year’s awardees will also be featured in our new “St. Louis Community Development in Action” traveling photography exhibit, an exhibit highlighting the positive impact community development activities has had in the region.

Click here to purchase event tickets. Special discount is available to current CBN members. Please email admin@communitybuildersstl.org for the discount code or with any questions on the event.

Introducing CBN's next Executive Director

We are thrilled to announce that Linda Nguyen will be joining the CBN staff team as our next Executive Director on May 9!

Linda currently serves with Park Central Development as their Coordinator of Neighborhood Initiatives and Engagement. She’s been an active part of the CBN network, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Coalition, and the Community Engagement Action Group for many years and is looking forward to engaging with our work from this new vantage point.

Our member organizations’ input served as the foundation for this transition process, and we are grateful for the time and wisdom they shared with us! Many, many thanks also go to the CBN Board of Directors and ED Transition Committee for leading the search and selection process over the past several months. Finally, thanks too to EMD Consulting for providing support on logistics related to the search.

Please help us give Linda a warm welcome! Here’s a little more about her:

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Linda came to St. Louis back in 2013 to get her Master’s Degree in Social Work from Washington University with a concentration in social and economic development and a specialization in nonprofit management. Linda is dedicated to the strengthening of organizations’ capacity and building strong neighborhoods through reinvestment in people and places.

In the last decade, she has created and managed anti-displacement programming that addresses the needs of hundreds of low- and moderate-income households, completed four community-wide needs assessments to identify current gaps of service and areas of opportunities, provided strategic planning and board development for two growing nonprofits, and organized numerous community events and workshops that provided community stakeholders with the tools to take action. Prior to working in the community development field in St. Louis, she has over ten years of experience in social welfare case management and counseling support in an urban setting working closely with seniors, people with disabilities, at-risk youth and families, and homeless populations.

Linda is passionate about working together to build the capacity of leaders and organizations to address the inequities in the St. Louis region. With over two decades of grassroot nonprofit experiences, she looks forward to creating meaningful relationships that connect the private and public sectors to all the great opportunities that make St. Louis a wonderful place to live, work, and play.

Introducing the St. Louis Affordable Housing Report Card

For more information, contact:
Jenny Connelly-Bowen
Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis
314-730-5449
jenny@communitybuildersstl.org

St. Louis gets an “F” in affordable housing for Black households, renters, and people with the lowest incomes, says new St. Louis Affordable Housing Report Card

ST. LOUIS ​​– November 8, 2021 – The new St. Louis Affordable Housing Report Card, released today on affordablestl.com, reminds us that St. Louis is a tale of two cities. For some, such as households earning over the region’s median income, our area is rich in naturally affordable housing. But for everyone else, including Black households and most renters, affordable housing is hard to find. Affordable housing is not only a social and economic issue, but also a racial justice imperative.

The St. Louis Affordable Housing Report Card was created as an accessible, easy-to-use tool for community organizations, housing advocates, regional decision-makers, and residents in St. Louis City and County who want to see growth in and more equitable use of affordable housing resources.

Thanks to generous support from the Deaconess Foundation, the Report Card was commissioned by the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis (CBN) for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund (AHTF) Coalition. URBNRX served as the lead consultant on the project with support from Osiyo Design + Engagement.

Jenny Connelly-Bowen, Executive Director with CBN, emphasizes that it is critical to review the Affordable Housing Report Card’s findings in the context of systemic racism. “While a lack of quality and affordable housing for lower income residents affects people of all races and ethnicities in our region, we cannot release this Report Card without acknowledging St. Louis’ specific history and the pervasive effects of racial segregation,” she says. “Many disparities in our region’s affordable housing landscape are the legacy of systemic racism.”

Race has sculpted St. Louis’ social geography and physical infrastructure, dividing Black and white families both physically and economically. This “geography of inequity” was created intentionally over many decades by those in power and reinforced, sometimes unintentionally, by systems and infrastructure. Policies that encouraged white flight, housing discrimination against Black residents, and preferential lending led to racial segregation that negatively impacts Black St. Louisans to this day.

St. Louis continues to be one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in our nation. Wealth, health and longer life expectancy, employment opportunities, and political power are pooled in majority white neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods are rich in culture and experience, yet riddled with substandard housing, vacant properties, illegal dumping, lead pollution, and other negative social determinants of health.

Cristina Garmendia, Principal and Founder at URBNRX, shares, “Over the course of the past year, we have worked together with the St. Louis community of affordable housing advocates to identify meaningful measures of success and to discover where our data and evaluation infrastructure currently falls short. The Report Card summarizes both the ‘state of housing data’ and our recommendations for how our region can strengthen accountability for achieving their affordable housing goals.” She adds, “The model developed to estimate unmet affordable housing demand was a major undertaking, with a methodology carefully reviewed by Coalition members, City housing consultants, and County staff.”

Thanks to generous support from FLOURISH St. Louis, over the coming months, Blackrock Consulting will be conducting Report Card engagement sessions in targeted geographies experiencing the greatest levels of infant mortality, which are nearly all predominantly Black neighborhoods. “The Affordable Housing Report Card gives us the data as housing advocates, residents, and policymakers to make concrete demands and realistic goals that meet the needs of our most impacted communities,” says Sunni Hutton, Director with Blackrock Consulting. “There's still more ongoing data needed, but this report, like many others before it, only confirms the plight of Black folks and Black families in our region. And now there's no more excuses—as a region we must invest in our most impacted, transform inequitable systems, and let the most impacted lead.”

Report Card organizers hope that it starts conversations, gives community leaders the tools they need to make their own recommendations, and provides policymakers and elected officials with data they can use to better understand housing needs and track progress. 

To learn more, please visit affordablestl.com.

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About the Community Builders Network and Affordable Housing Trust Fund Coalition:

The Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis (CBN) is a coalition of community building organizations, including community-based nonprofits, lenders, private developers, philanthropic organizations, and government actors. CBN exists to support, connect, and celebrate the St. Louis region’s community builders in three primary ways:

1. Strong Organizations - CBN’s organizational capacity building programs support our members and their partners so they can do their best work.

2. Supportive Systems - CBN’s civic capacity building programs build bridges across places, sectors, and silos and advocate for policies that strengthen our civic muscle.

3. Sharing Stories - CBN’s public awareness building programs spread the word about what it takes to make our neighborhoods great places to live—and why strong communities matter.

CBN has been facilitating the Affordable Housing Trust Fund (AHTF) Coalition since its founding in 2018. The AHTF Coalition convenes stakeholders from many sectors who actively support increased funding and a greater role for the AHTF in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. Members of the AHTF Coalition have lifted up the immense need for affordable housing in St. Louis, but acknowledged that our region doesn't fully understand the scope of this need. In commissioning this Report Card, the Coalition was particularly motivated by data from East-West Gateway Council of Governments that showed 75% of low-income Black households are housing cost-burdened (paying more than 30% of their income on housing), compared with 62% of low-income white households.

To learn more about the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Coalition, visit communitybuildersstl.org/affordable-housing-trust-fund-coalition.

To learn more about CBN, visit communitybuildersstl.org. 

About URBNRX:

URBNRX is a research consulting practice that provides data and research support to leaders and organizations that seek to:

• Make more equitable decisions that takes into account disparate impact

• Develop more comprehensive strategy that addresses gaps and blindspots

• Practice accountability in a way that builds the foundation for innovation

To learn more about URBNRX, visit urbnredux.com.

About Osiyo Design + Engagement:

A traditional Cherokee greeting, Osiyo means “it is well” or “hello.” From developing branding that makes a statement, planning events that build community ties, to forming coalitions that engage around policy change, Osiyo Design + Engagement creates meaningful connections, moments, and messages.

To learn more about Osiyo Design + Engagement, visit osiyodesign.com.

Celebrating 10 Years of Community Building Memories

To help celebrate CBN's 10th birthday, a group of longstanding CBN members, partners, and Community Development Family Reunion attendees shared their stories and photos from the past decade (and beyond) for a special 10-Year Anniversary Memory Book. Madeleine Swanstrom (pictured second from the left) collected everyone's memories and assembled the book for us.

Thank you, Madeleine, and thank you again to everyone who shared something for the book! Click here or on the image below to page through it!

Help CBN welcome our three newest Board Members!

CBN is excited to welcome three new members to our Board of Directors in October 2021 and January 2022!

When the CBN Board of Directors has vacant seats, it appoints a Board Nominations Subcommittee to oversee the nominations process. During summer and fall 2021, this committee:

• Evaluated current Board strengths and gaps

• Created a scoring tool based on identified priority areas

• Solicited nominations

• Scored and evaluated finalists

• Arranged follow-up conversations with top candidate choices to discuss potential interest and clarify any scoring questions

• Made a recommendation to the full Board in October

Delesha George
Midwest BankCentre
Assistant to the Chief Information Officer

Joining January 2022

Deleshā N. George is a proud St. Louis native who is committed to doing her part to empower and engage communities and move them forward. After returning home to St. Louis from Washington, DC, in 2012, Deleshā decided to focus on work that would benefit the people of Saint Louis and she has not looked back since. She has worked in corporate and nonprofit settings, having recently joined Midwest BankCentre after working for United Way of Greater Saint Louis. Deleshā is dedicated to working alongside and on behalf of others to have a better understanding of communities’ needs and how best to serve them.

Becky Reinhart
DeSales Community Development
Assistant Director

Joining January 2022

Becky was born and raised in southside St. Louis. An alumna of the St. Louis Public Schools, Becky continued her education with a double-major in American Studies and Spanish at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She earned her MA in Applied Literary and Cultural Studies in Dortmund, Germany. Following her drive to help St. Louis become a healthier, more equitable city, Becky joined DeSales Community Development as Director of Community Health Initiatives in January 2017.

A resident of the Tower Grove East neighborhood, one of Becky’s favorite things about her job is the opportunity to serve the community where she lives. When Becky isn’t busy directing community programs, she enjoys running around Tower Grove Park with her dogs Hövels and Knut.

Paul Woodruff
St. Louis Community Credit Union
Vice President of Community Development

Joined October 2021

Paul Woodruff serves as the Vice President of Community Development for St. Louis Community Credit Union (SLCCU). In this capacity, he is responsible for managing strategic initiatives which fund, support, and advance interventions designed to decrease racial and economic inequity throughout the St. Louis region. Paul began his career in 2009 as a teller at SLCCU and has subsequently worked in a variety of roles advancing community development finance objectives for the institution. In 2013, he moved into his current role as the Vice President of Community Development and as the Executive Director of SLCCU’s sister nonprofit, Prosperity Connection. In April of 2021 he left his post at Prosperity Connection to focus his efforts on credit union priorities. Prior to joining SLCCU, Paul received his Master’s in Public Administration from St. Louis University, where his research focused on credit union alternatives to payday loans.

As an active member of the community development sector, Paul shares his expertise through a variety of advisory and board positions. Since 2014 he has served on the board of Inclusiv, a national Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) advocacy association for credit unions, where he is currently the Vice Chair. Additionally, he serves on the Board of Directors of Habitat for Humanity St. Louis, as well as on advisory councils for US Bank and Washington University’s Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement. Outside of work, Paul loves to read, cook, entertain, and enjoy his beloved hometown, St. Louis, Missouri.

2021 Award for Resident Leadership

Congratulations to Sundy Whiteside, recipient of our 2021 Award for Resident Leadership! Sundy is a resident of the Walnut Park East neighborhood, Board President of the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO), and Co-Chair of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative's Vacancy Advisory Committee.

The Award for Resident Leadership recognizes a person who:

• Has shown incredible volunteerism and involvement in their community and/or community initiatives.

• Goes above and beyond typical resident action to sit on boards, head committees, and/or encourage the engagement of other residents.

• Works to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Sundy to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Sundy had to say.

Sundy Whiteside, resident of the Walnut Park East neighborhood, Board President of the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO), and Co-Chair of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative's Vacancy Advisory Committee (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

I was raised in North St. Louis City. I’ve seen it in much better times when people were more engaged and active in our neighborhood and critical elements that played a role in kids’ lives, like schools, were stronger. Schools were the place to go and the place to be. The old high school that’s now an elementary school around the corner from my house used to have after-school activities and put on plays. There were team sports and games. You can still see a basketball or football game at some, but things are different in terms of safety. I just don’t see our kids having enough of those types of recreational activities today to get to know each other. There used to be a time when children in the neighborhood would play outside and sit on the porch when the street lights came on. They didn’t have to worry about anything like someone being shot and killed or drug deals. Now it’s like a street mentality has taken over. Instead of fighting with their fists when they have an argument, now kids kill. Maybe the use of guns was glamorized playing things like cowboys and Indians, but weapons like that used to be feared. I see youth posing with them on social media now like there’s this sexy appeal to them and I’m astonished. Then again, when I hear about these kids being shot or killed, I guess I’m not exactly surprised.

I miss simple things, like counting on Sunday dinners. If there was an event and I had to wear a dress, I’d have one. My mother loved to buy me clothes. Everyone in the neighborhood, whether they were poor or had money, we all got new Christmas clothes and Easter outfits. Nowadays, some kids don’t even have what we’d call a going to church outfit. I hate how the family unit has been decimated in my community. Families had a strict ‘we care about you, so we’re not allowing you to do terrible things’ understanding. Now the senior members lost that sense of influence and authority to the point where families are almost afraid to say something when they know their own child is out in the streets doing bad things. Things have changed. The family structure is different. Priorities are different. A lot of it is due to drugs. Someone’s mother gets addicted to crack, her son ends up being the local drug dealer, and then his son takes over. It’s sad to see. There was a time when crack wasn’t in the lives of people around me. Everybody seemed to care more, seemed to be concerned more, seemed to value each other’s lives more than what we do today.

I come from one of those families everybody knew in the neighborhood — my grandmother, my mother, my aunts. Everyone called my grandmother, ‘Nana.’ She was nice but also had that strict side. She was known for maintaining her lawn. And if you were playing and stepped on it, she’d let you know: ‘Get off my grass!’ Every morning, she’d brew a pot of coffee, people would come over, and they’d sit on her front porch or in her kitchen to talk. The landscape’s so different now. It’s hard to trust anyone from the neighborhood streets and have them come in your house or have a cup of coffee in your kitchen.

What is it that makes you tireless about the work you do?

There are so many topics I’m into now — vacancies, cleanups, community development, benefit agreements. The work I do creates hope and that’s what keeps me doing it. When I host an event, especially neighborhood cleanups that go well, people are excited and there’s a lot of love. And, you know, we appreciate volunteers coming into the City and helping us clean up our neighborhoods. But when you see your own neighbors show up and clean up, and they’re working hard to keep our area clean, it’s even more inspiring. Like, “Okay, I do live in a place that’s worth something.” Looking around my neighborhood, there are dilapidated buildings, people are selling crack and speeding down the street, and it’s scary because you don’t know what’s getting ready to pop off. Living here, stuff like that can almost make you feel worthless. But then through these neighborhood cleanups that I help run, I see residents bonding from the planning process to the cleanups and it’s great. I go to many different neighborhoods in the City and I experience that over and over again. A lot of times I know the people, or I don’t know them at all and try to bring them together. And everything about the whole experience brings about camaraderie. It creates a synergy that breeds hope in our community.

SLACO is trying to build the capacity of neighborhood residents to unite, mobilize, and organize. People’s voices have been neglected for so long, some don’t even speak anymore. So we’re bringing more equity to the table to change that. Everything I’m doing from co-founding the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative and co-chairing the Vacancy Advisory Committee to securing the Proposition Neighborhood Stabilization fund is focused on inclusivity and it’s community-driven. That also gives people hope, and that’s what gives me the breathe to keep going.

North of Delmar, trash is a huge issue. Even though our brick buildings are beautiful, we live in an environment where the worth of the housing and the area is not valued. Insiders and outsiders will just dump their things here. People living here have complained so much and authorities started to crack down by enforcing fines. But there’s a point where not enough is being done and the dumping and bad things continue to happen. Then it almost makes you feel like there must be a reason for that and, ultimately, it comes back to it being a reflection of you. When the value of where you live is minimal or worthless, you start to adopt that way of thinking. Then you start seeing children and adults recognizing the trash around here and throwing their drink containers on some vacant lot too. Now we’ve collectively developed a sense of, ‘Where I live is not worth anything. And if everyone else around me thinks that way, it’s probably the truth.’

So neighborhood cleanups inspire new ways for people to bond and see other residents who want to roll up their sleeves and do something for where we live. The first neighborhood cleanup I put together with my residents was in 2016. We always take before and after pictures. I always try to have snacks or food because it’s fun to break bread together. What do you do with family, with people you love and those who have taken care of you all your life? You get together, catch up, eat, and bond. And when we end our cleanups, the ‘I didn’t know you’ from before has completely changed. Neighborhood residents share a greater sense of worth and value. They feel euphoric and loved, like, ‘Yeah, we did it!’

Who’s the youngest person that came to a neighborhood cleanup and touched your heart?

I know a 14-year-old who comes to the cleanups. He’ll ride his bike there and do a lot of stuff. I just met him at a Fairground Park cleanup we did through North Newstead. This child is a talker and he talked the whole time. He’s brilliant. And after we got done, he said, “I really like this. I didn’t know our neighborhood was as bad off as it is.” Doing these cleanups, you really get to see the ins and outs of your neighborhood and it’s one of those things you want to close your eyes to after a while. It’s disturbing and distressing. I said, “Yeah, and I think every resident should be required to canvass in their area too so they can see what it looks like.”

What he saw that first day he came out to help was intense. And now he comes to our cleanups and is working with us. He’s inspired and really wants to do community work, so that’s a good thing. That’s why I applied for a grant to pay youth to participate so they can have that same euphoria I feel when I work in the community and also feel worthy. If that can be cultivated at a young age, that feeling will stay with that child through adulthood and they’ll want to care for and volunteer in their community. We don’t have a lot of money to do things, but we have a lot of people who care and are working together.

I want to charge every resident, especially north of Delmar, to commit to two hours every month of some form of community involvement. Whether you go to your local ward meeting or a parent-teacher meeting, it’s a small request. We don’t have the luxury to not be engaged and in community. It’s urgent. We’re about to be transformed. In other people’s eyes, our area is about to be revitalized. And in my eyes, we’re about to be pushed out if we don’t get more engaged and connected. 

I don’t like the concept of ‘clean sweep.’ The terminology means to remove an unwanted person or object. It’s normally used in political elections, in the penal system, or in military terms. But it’s not what I want to hear used in neighborhoods, and that’s what’s getting ready to happen. If we don’t wake up and become active in what’s going on in some of our areas, we won’t be able to afford to live in them, and we will be pushed out.

My family and another family were one of the first Black families to move to Walnut Park. We had a lot of Caucasians living on the street and then they moved out. That led to a lot of the decline we see on the north side. Disinvestment and redlining tactics are being used to decrease our quality of life so we either move or have no voice, no money, no resources, nothing to stand on. My mother and grandmother used to say, “They’re blighting us out now. One day, they’re gonna show up here when it almost gets to rock bottom and take over.” And I want to say, “They are here.”

I watch the areas on the edge of Delmar, like Academy Sherman Park and the West End, doing their neighborhood planning to deal with the recent redevelopment there. And that’s what’s coming for the neighborhoods further north too. Gentrification is on the way. It’s an emergency situation and why every resident should start engaging with their community. Their lives depend on it. We can’t just allow it to weigh on our seniors and adults. We have to start nurturing our children to cultivate value in this too. That’s the critical piece that will help create and sustain thriving neighborhoods for the future.

The level of participation in the community is strong but it’s also on life support. And I love the word ‘community,’ but I also love the word ‘neighborhood.’ For a long time, in my neighborhood, I never knew a Walnut Park East and a Walnut Park West. We were just Walnut Park, united. And I think about how at some point, we dropped the word ‘neighbor.’ The atmosphere just becomes the ‘hood.’ What a contrast. A name is critical. It has such an impact. My name is Sundy, and something seeps in there to permeate in my cells that causes me to be kind of sunshine-y. Anyway, remember Sesame Street and how they sang, “Who are the people in your neighborhood?” Someone pointed out how SLACO talks about being an umbrella association for all the neighborhoods, but what is a neighborhood? Where some people grow up, they have no concept of it. Oh my goodness, it’s true! When I looked out my window to see the landscape, we had Mrs. Sneed across the street and Mrs. Ashley — we had neighborhood and that sense of community. We really knew who the people were in the neighborhood — the person who drove the bus, the person who delivered mail. Now so many residents don’t even want to get to know each other. It’s a different atmosphere. In my neighborhood, we do have a groundswell of community. We have those pockets of neighbors we all love and give a card to or vegetables from our gardens. Still, it used to be stronger.

One day I came outside my house and there were like 60 kids on the corner. The most recent thing they started doing when young people got shot and killed was a balloon release and then they shoot bullets up in the air. They’d shoot for like seven minutes and it would horrify us living in the area. So I talked to the local lady who’s more in tune with the younger folks and asked if she could set up something for people from my generation to dialogue with them, because I really want them to come to our SLACO conference. Teaching younger people is the critical piece. There’s this African proverb that says ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.’ I feel like that’s what is happening in our neighborhoods, in our community.

I walked outside, and was like, Mr. Sneed, “What’s going on down the street?” And he said, “I don’t know. I saw all of that. But let me tell you if it’s not your house, Ms. Troy’s house, or Mr. Anderson’s house, I don’t pay any attention. I’m not worried about anybody else but you all.” So we’ve reduced ourselves to select families who we’ve always known in the neighborhood and kind of keeping everyone else at arm’s distance.

I live in my grandmother’s house. The reason I stayed in St. Louis is that my mother fell ill. Mom loved to smoke and to eat whatever she wanted to — sugar, fried food. She didn’t exercise much, but she worked hard to have a better life for me and I did the same for my daughter. Mom had her first stroke when I was in college. I was like, “Lord, how can you allow this to happen to my mom?” It just got worse. A few years after I graduated, she started losing her memory and was in the early stages of dementia. I was her caretaker for nine years and it was hard. I was also working as an electrical engineer and I paid a nurse to come to my mother’s house to care for her.

Courtesy of Sundy Whiteside

My mom was originally a school teacher but ended up working for Anheuser Busch in the brewery as a bottler. She made a lot of money doing that and it put me through school at Missouri University of Science and Technology, formerly known as UMR, the University of Missouri-Rolla. Mom was diagnosed with diabetes in her 40s and you always think your parents — mothers, especially — who organize, plan, and orchestrate everything would be on top of things. Well, she was on insulin shots and wasn’t administering her shots like she should have. By the time she was 65, she had her first stroke which turned into multiple strokes. Veins delivering oxygen to her brain started to collapse and that caused her to have dementia.

She had wild episodes. I wish I could write a book on all of the episodes she had wandering down the street and around the corner. In her early stages, I didn’t even know what dementia was. When she started to not drive so well, I just thought maybe she was out of practice. She still looked so young, she was witty, and she’d go off on you but you’d be loving it. I remember I was working in St. Peters and she’d call me to take her somewhere. I was like, “But you have a car. You can drive. C’mon now!” She said, “No, I need you to come take me.” So I thought I’d give her a lesson again. I was so naive. My daughter, my mom, and I hopped in the car and I had Mom driving in a big parking lot. It was the most alarming thing and that’s when I realized she was not putting on.

She hadn’t started losing her memories, but eventually it got bad. She was incontinent and needed to be bathed daily. My mother lived five blocks from her 90-year-old mother, so we moved them in together. My grandmother couldn’t do anything to help though. One day I just cleaned my mother up and brought her with me to work. She sat there almost the whole day. I don’t think she enjoyed it, but it was like bringing my daughter to work when she got out of school early. She didn’t bother anybody. Thank goodness, no one said anything.

When I took her to the bathroom to clean her face, I warm the washcloth and give it to her and she’d start cleaning the counter. So she’d have these episodes and then be back to her normal self. When she got more ill, I needed to move her into a nursing home and within months she died. But while I spent time with her all those years, I always wanted to know, “Is my mother in there? Is she trapped? Is she feeling like she can’t articulate what’s happening?” I wanted to know, not from experience, but I’d like someone to share what having dementia is really like.

Courtesy of Sundy Whiteside

The mother-daughter relationship has been the most powerful relationship in my life, whether it’s my relationship with my mom or my relationship with my daughter. That relationship dynamic has been my most emotional and powerful human connection. I spent a few years in a depressed state after my mother passed and then my grandmother. Finally, when my daughter was just about finished with college, I got back to work and began with the Community Action Partnership movement at the Human Development Corporation as their network administrator and IT person. And my daughter is now a Doctor of Pharmacy — Dr. Whiteside — and she’s engaged to be married. I am so blessed and excited! When she was a year from graduating, I felt like there was a light at the end of the tunnel and this single parent Mom was ready to do more things in the community. I’d go to meetings, become engaged, and pay attention to what was happening. I started doing neighborhood cleanups, tutoring math and science to students, and working with the Walnut Park East Neighborhood Association. From there, SLACO and vacancy. Now my position is all-volunteer, and I love what I do.

- Sundy Whiteside, resident of the Walnut Park East neighborhood, Board President of the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO), and Co-Chair of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative's Vacancy Advisory Committee

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Sundy at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building

Congratulations to Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, recipient of our 2021 Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building!

The Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building recognizes a person who:

• Has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to community building work.

• Has exhibited leadership, vision, and a commitment to action and results.

• Has catalyzed outstanding impact in community building policy, investment, and/or community change.

• Has worked to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Barbara to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Barbara had to say.

Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?

Mom and Dad courtesy of Barbara Levin

When I was in second grade, I was president of the Busy Bee Club, so I knew I was going to be in charge. I always had to be in charge. I was the president of my youth group too. Then in college, I thought I would be a teacher. At one point, I was an English major. I was of the generation where teaching or nursing was what I was told to do. Social work wasn’t in our framework. My mother came to this country when she was 19. Neither my mother nor my father got beyond eighth grade, but education was really important in my family. So going to college was a big deal. My sister went to art school and worked hard to pay for that. I went to a state school because it was cheap. 

The year after I graduated with a BSW, my school implemented a one-year MSW combination. I was part of the first class to come back and get an MSW with advanced standing. I wanted to go to law school at that point, but I was also tired of school: “Three years of law school versus one year to get an MSW? Ah, I’ll do the MSW.” Of course, I went the clinical route because that’s what everybody did. And I never used it because I immediately got hired by a Jewish youth group to do program development, leadership training, and nonprofit advising. In the beginning, I did some therapy as volunteer work. But I always felt like I need to fix things. I can’t sit for an hour nodding my head and keeping my mouth shut going “um-hum.” Still, I use clinical work every day and I tell that to my students all the time.

Courtesy of Barbara Levin

Teaching is hard and it gets harder and harder. While I’m a co-teaching professor, 80% of my job is still field education, which is a lot of coaching and mentoring and developing more field units. One of the most fun things I do when I go to a meeting is sit in the back and count all the Brown School grads in the room talking, sticking with the work they’re doing in St. Louis, making a difference. And I just feel so proud. My husband, Barry, and I only had one child. So it feels like I have a lot of other children. And sometimes I treat them that way. Whenever we’re asked to go for a drink with somebody, they’re either getting married, getting pregnant, or looking for a new job and want to share with us. It’s one of the joys of being in St. Louis. It’s sad when people leave, but the more we can keep them and get them jobs, it’s important for the region. That is my life's work. And if people who come here are going to work in St. Louis, I want them to have a perspective that’s different from just a planning perspective. Social work brings to the table a set of values that are the essence of community development and, for me, it’s all about group work.

When I think about who taught me about community building and the work I’ve been doing for the past 46 years, it’s been a journey. At 13, I joined a Jewish youth group in Baltimore. We were all kids from the city and we weren’t members of anything. Our parents couldn’t afford to join a temple or even the Jewish Community Center. So we all met at each others’ homes and it was very homegrown. That’s how my husband and I met because he grew up in the same youth group movement. He got a scholarship to go to graduate school and I didn’t. But when I finished graduate school, my youth group leader called and asked, “Do you want to move to Boston and work for us?” I was in Boston, Barry was in New York, and we met at a staff meeting.

In those days, every staff person was a social worker. Nonprofits were the same way. Social workers ran everything until we agreed with boards that MBAs did better and we gave organizations up to them. Urban planning grew out of social work too. And what’s nice about community development is it’s not a profession. You don’t get a degree in it. Community development is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It’s a mishmash. You may be a lawyer who understands the legal aspects of zoning and codes, but maybe you don’t know how to talk to people. So it’s important to have social workers at the table. And at the youth group I worked for, every one of our leaders was a social worker. They’d bring in professors from the school of social work who taught us group dynamics at a weekend hotel event. I had to break into groups and facilitate. They set the framework, the values, the way we practiced. And that, to me, was community building.

When I think of social capital, it isn’t about my relationship with people, it’s about the networks and connections people have with each other in a neighborhood. It takes a very long time to build those because it’s about building trust.

If you don’t go to a meeting for six months, I’ve seen that people can forget you. If you move away and come back, it’s hard to get re-established too — which, you can — but, the networks change easily. I don’t want to go to another meeting. I’m as bad as everyone else! I don’t even volunteer in my own neighborhood. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be engaged or bring value. We have to get around the idea that leaders are the ones who show up. They often show up in places designed for the traditional leader — like, someone with time and resources who can attend a monthly meeting. I worried about that with COVID. It was sad that a lot of students didn’t want to enroll in my community development practice class during the pandemic, so we didn’t have the two semesters we usually do in the school year. Students were saying they couldn’t do community development on Zoom, yet the neighborhoods were doing just that. If students can learn how to stay connected and engaged over the computer, in-person’s a no-brainer.

It’s easy to break down social capital connections because they’re tenuous, transient, and, especially at a neighborhood level, people are moving in and out all the time. When do we call elders on the block ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’ anymore? There’s a couple on our block with two kids and they asked, “What are you comfortable with them calling all of you? We don’t want them to call you by your first names.” So I’m either Aunt Barbara or Miss Barbara. It’s that old Southern thing. I still call Miss Shirley, Miss Shirley. And we just lost Miss Dolores from O’Fallon. Connections are falling apart and it has nothing to do with the economics of a neighborhood.

Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis pictured with Constance Siu, Community Engagement Specialist at North Newstead Association (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

I’ve noticed there’s a shift in that social work students want to do policy. And policy doesn’t necessarily involve relationships. The same people who want to do policy, when we sit down at a cafe with community neighbors, they can’t even speak. You see they’re uncomfortable walking the street and waving at somebody. They’re not even used to doing that in the neighborhoods where they live. I can immediately tell who’s comfortable and who smiles at people versus those who can’t handle being around people. That’s not a Karl or Jillian Guenther; that’s not a Jessica Eiland; that’s not a Timetria Murphy-Watson, Vontriece McDowell, or Constance Siu. It’s kind of like leadership. I understand leaders are not born. However, after eight years of working with teenagers in a youth leadership program, I can look out into a group of kids and pick out who’s going to be the leader. There’s something about their energy, openness, and aura.

The thing I’m most proud of and what got me into the community was being asked to co-teach a community development course the first time with Lou Columbo. He was the urban planner, I was the social worker, and we had to come together on this. We spent six months building relationships in the neighborhood we chose to focus on and we could then model that for students. Now I’ve been teaching that class for many years with Debra Moore and I’ve learned it doesn’t work if a neighborhood is used as a project and a relationship is not built to have something ongoing. It’s a struggle every semester to do that.

My commitment is at the neighborhood level and with the students. So how do we keep it fresh? We’ve consistently been doing semesters in Hyde Park and they then don’t see WashU as being used for research. They knew we would be part of a long-term commitment. That’s very important, just like the message that we give to students. Students are learning things the community already has. Of course, students will learn what Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is. I want students to fundamentally learn how to build relationships. And neighborhoods don’t want a newbie student asking them or testing out their interviewing skills on them. When it’s a one-time thing, the neighborhood is just a paper — the client who a report is written about. But long-term, the deliverables and educational outcomes are different.

Some speak of neighborhoods as a laboratory, and I don’t see them as that. I see them as our partners. The practice of teaching is you listen first to the community, you respond to them, and they have all the answers and assets. Our role is to support that and maybe add to it by giving information about best practices and helping the community decide how to make movements forward and prioritize. Sometimes when we’re teaching students, they’ll wonder what their role is, like, “I know more.” “No, you don’t. You know how to do some stuff. The community knows what it needs.” And if we can also bring some assets around Washington University in St. Louis’ presence and the Brown School’s presence, then that’s valuable too.

I have to continuously check myself because my go-to is to fix things. My daughter will tell you that in a minute. I’ll listen, I’ll ask questions, and then I’ll be like, “Okay, this is what I think you should do…” It’s really hard to just listen. And it’s really hard to listen to something someone’s gonna do that I don’t think is gonna do them well. Even with students, I focus on building that long-term relationship so I can ask them, “Have you thought about trying this or that?” My goal is not just to teach them but to get them on a career path. I love when they can get a job in St. Louis and stay. I wish there were more opportunities though.

Do you find it interesting and challenging or is it creative?

Initially, I was hired at the Brown School to be the program coordinator of an endowed program. The vision was to provide technical assistance for small nonprofits that couldn’t afford consultants and felt that the school had a responsibility to provide that for social service agencies. Alliance for Building Capacity, ABC, was its name and it changed a number of times until it broadened to capacity building through community development and practicum. Whether it’s technical assistance or capacity building, how it’s done for a nonprofit is similar to how it’s done for community development. 

So I don’t go into projects and meetings telling you what you need to do. I’m not the consultant who says, “Everyone needs a strategic plan, you gotta do it my way, and this is what you do,” which is sometimes how planners and designers come in. Instead, it’s, “What do you need? What’s your priority? How can I help you build what you want to build?” It’s coming in where people are at, getting the lay of the land from their perspective, and figuring out what I can add to their goals to better their community.

I know my work has to be creative or at least perceived to be unique. And the challenge in the relationship is listening and offering and thinking about what could work. I have no one way of doing things except to listen and to respond. I also know what doesn’t work. I was asked to help with a CDC in a neighborhood group I didn’t spend a lot of time with. I knew people on the board and I approached the invitation to capacity build for the organization. But what they weren’t doing was really listening to the community. So they needed to do their own work. I had to tell them, “We may be ready to do what you want to do, but who is here at the table?” How do you build readiness? Nonprofits aren’t always ready. Communities are often not ready.

Who’s really not heard when it comes to voice and community engagement?

What I’ve been thinking about lately is this whole idea of voice and community engagement. I read an article about how it’s a false narrative because there’s always going to be somebody left out. You may have a majority, like the people who attend to vote on something or do community participatory budgeting, but somebody’s voice is not going to get heard. There’s history around developers who want to come into a community and get some work done and they get a voice. And when they don’t like what they hear or get what they want, they don’t just leave. They’ll keep going around an issue looking to convince people until they decide to pull the funding or find another area they can invest in. Some of this also systematically relates to how communities are funded and how we make decisions. There’s so much need and so much money and so many hands in the pot that investment funds rarely get to the community. The work is a result of historic and ongoing systemic racism at every level and in every aspect — housing, education, economic development, transportation, infrastructure — related to policy and funding access. At the end of the day, we may not be redlining, but we’re doing it anyway. We still have covenants. And we still have to deal with the aftermath because it impacts another couple of hundred years.

What’s a ripple effect you’re particularly proud of that you’ve left in St. Louis?

The reputation of the graduate students who are working in St. Louis. We, more than when I started, recognize the Brown School has something to offer. Our community development work and social work are valuable. And practicum is an innovative way of impacting a community without having to do work in the classroom. I’ll give you an example from the first semester I taught in Hyde Park.

One of our students had a practicum with a community group that was formed and the group wanted to do a Halloween event. So they came up with the idea of calling it Spooktacular and the student convened a group of kids and parents to see what Halloween would look like in the neighborhood. They had never done that before. There were two other groups involved and they were gonna get some money and do a trunk-or-treat that the kids said they wanted at the nearby school.

So we figured out a way to map out a route. One of the locals in Hyde Park has a balloon business, so we bought balloons from her and ballooned the route. Then my students went door to door to ask if residents would be home and if they needed candy we would get them candy. Then we met at the corner of Salisbury and N. 23rd St., planned out for students to take about 10 kids to start the route, another 10 would register, and students would take off to do the route with them too. Then they’d get to the end at Clay Elementary School where there’d be the trunk-or-treat and other organizations would celebrate Spooktacular too.

A half an hour in, like 200 kids and their parents came out of the woodwork. And our students had to teach the kids how to knock on doors. Children would bang on them because they’d never just knocked on someone’s door and said “trick-or-treat!” The parents said, “Oh my god, we never thought we’d do this in Hyde Park.” They used to get in the car and head to the Central West End or Ladue because they didn’t want to do trick-or-treat in their neighborhood for lots of different reasons.

We ended the evening, but it’s continued in that neighborhood in different ways and each time it’s changed depending on what the neighborhood wanted. About the fourth time, the neighborhood decided to have the event at the park in Hyde Park. They got funding and had a stage and dancing and made a horror maze out of wood and it was all very do-it-yourself. They celebrated on a Wednesday night. It was dark. And there were 300 to 400 people there.

A woman whose organization participated was standing with me and Debra Moore and said, “Isn’t this great?” We said, “You did a great job.” And, to us, that was success because the people from the neighborhood knew and felt like they did it. The neighborhood felt like they owned it and they did.

Not only in academia but in the world, if you don’t write about it and document it, it’s as if it didn’t happen. Debra Moore and I talk about how we should have written up the Halloween in Hyde Park story or the work we’ve done in O’Fallon as some sort of paper. Even some of the early work I did with Alliance for Building Capacity, which has since become East Side Aligned. If you don’t write down the stories, they disappear.

What would make a tremendous difference in the work you’d like to do moving forward?

The academic in me would love to be able to point to population-level change. Is the average income in Hyde Park higher with people moving in and out or has it stabilized? Are the residents staying and feeling like they’re part of the neighborhood? How do you measure engagement? Maybe through voting, maybe people want to buy a house if they could, maybe they want to rent to own and it becomes their place? Are people seeing the area as a place they want to be a part of?

I would love to say we can document some of that and I don’t know that we can. That’s way long-term. And I don’t know how to tackle the crime stats. A couple of years ago, there was a little boy shot in Hyde Park right in the street where there’s new housing. There’s a lot of development that has been done. Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church is right there. And with the randomness of shootings and crime, unless we can tackle that, I don’t know how any of this development is really going to move along.

I’m excited to come back for school in person in the Fall and to figure out what’s happening in the neighborhood, what it needs, and how we can support. I haven’t had enough opportunities to really sit with people and hear. And there’s going to be that whole process of meeting with people and opening up again.

Courtesy of Barbara Levin

Why have you decided to put your time and energy into St. Louis and stay?

Honestly, I was a trailing spouse, yelling and screaming in 1993. We came because of my husband’s job. And I said, “Okay, let’s try five years,” and now it’s almost 30 years later. I started working at the Brown School in 2002. It gave me a whole other set of energy. The university can be a great hindrance, but it’s also a gift to work there. Why am I staying now? It’s an easy place to be. We’re city folk. We love cities. And the cities we love the most, we can’t afford to live in. If I could live in Manhattan, I would. Well, after COVID and Zoom, I don’t know. But, life changes.

Courtesy of Barbara Levin

Eventually, I know I’ll want to be closer to my grandbabies. They have changed everything. We just did an interview with the organization that supports work for children with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy, the syndrome one of our granddaughters has. We have a voice to advocate for families without resources. I don’t know how they manage without healthcare coverage, so our heart is there with them. Every child should have access to the kinds of support she has access to. So if we can use our voices in that way, that would be my next thing too. I see the world differently now. I see the world alongside someone with limited physical capacity. It’s a disability in the sense that the structures keep her from being able to be fully in the world.

What’s something about community building today that you didn’t know?

There are textbooks full of stuff I don’t know. But it has reinforced the idea that a top-down approach doesn’t always work. And a bottom-up approach doesn’t always work because if you don’t have the political clout to have that voice, it may not work. How do you find that middle ground? Community building is still evolving and that keeps me excited. The model is still very much about power and money. Where are they and who’s got them?

I read a report from St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) and the first part was a history of all the plans that have been made around St. Louis. I’d be interested to see how much of that money was spent for very little outcomes, except for the ones where plans said to build Highway 64/40 through Mill Creek and North City. That worked. That they were able to do. And that’s the whole history of racism and continued racism in this city. I don’t mind calling it out either. 

But how many redevelopment plans actually worked? How do they define community engagement? How did they follow through? And how much money was paid for consultants? I know that last one is cynical and consultants are needed. But so little money gets to people. What would happen if we gave everybody a liveable wage? We could do it. It’s less about money than it is about decisions and leadership. There is money. It’s just not spent how it could be. Webster Groves and East St. Louis have similar city budgets. Who would have known?

Way way back, I was on the decision committee for the annual Community Builders Network awards. I feel like I haven’t been in community development as long or contributed as much as others who might be more deserving. I’m always thinking what I’m doing is not as impactful, so I was really humbled and taken aback by this idea of getting the lifetime achievement award this year.

I remember the day Karl Guenther had a video conference call with folks in Philadelphia about how they have a community development corporation (CDC) umbrella organization. And he walked out of my office, stood in the hallway, and said, “We have to do this in St. Louis!” I told him, “Let’s make it work.” They did it at UMSL because Todd Swanstrom had his Des Lee endowment money to do it. But my history with CBN goes back to the beginning and I believe in what it does and what it has done and how it’s brought us together.

Invest STL came from this idea of developing a local funding resource specifically for community development. So how do we raise money together that will eventually build into a pot we could share with CDCs because funding for them is so minimal? And it started with Karl Guenther and Jessica Eiland and a few other people hanging out at bars one night a week and us putting in $10. Hank Webber and I would attend and we felt like the grandparents of the group. I’d put my money in, have a little drink, and then leave when it got late and I had to go to bed. Since then, it’s morphed into the region’s community economic development support system for growing great neighborhoods in STL.

- Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Barbara at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism

Congratulations to WEPOWER, recipient of our 2021 Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism!

The Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:

• Demonstrates a deep and honest commitment to transforming work being done in the St. Louis region so that it is more equitable, just, and antiracist.

• “Walks the talk”—goes beyond verbal commitments to ask hard questions, embrace and push through discomfort, work to rectify inequities where they exist, and take action.

• Actively works to dismantle systems of oppression.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Charli Cooksey, WEPOWER’s Founder and CEO, to learn more about her and the work her team does. Here’s some of what Charli had to say.

Charli Cooksey, Founder and CEO of WEPOWER (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

The most grounding moments I have are when I am in relationship with and proximate and deeply listening to Black women — Black mothers and Black childhood providers, in particular. They keep me grounded in who I’m accountable to, why I’m doing this work, why it’s urgent, and where to focus. From 2018 to 2020, a group of organizations had been working really hard to gear up for a ballot measure in St. Louis County to win up to $84 million per year for early childhood education. That would have been the first time in the history of St. Louis that there would be local dedicated public funding for early childhood and it would have been a significant amount that was going to be guaranteed for ECE centers and public schools with pre-k programs with the majority of dollars focused on North St. Louis County.

It’s interesting because all of our systems were failing Black families before the pandemic and the pandemic exacerbated things that we knew were already unacceptable. So it was something that was desperately needed and we were working super hard. We had our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed and had this beautiful campaign launch for Ready By Five. We got together in the school gym of a UCity elementary school with hundreds of folks and kicked it off with a signature-gathering initiative because we needed to get a little over 40,000 signatures to be placed on the ballot by November 2020.

We had a plan. We were hitting the ground. And there was so much energy in the space. We even turned off the lights and turned on our phone lights, waving them in the air, declaring our commitment to children and to winning the ballot measure. Then we transitioned to a training of organizing where we had tons of folks there committed to learning how to build power to win money for our babies, birth to five years old. The next week, our team and partners gathered signatures all day from people while standing in the rain. We were just building so much momentum. We had collected our first 1,000 signatures almost immediately after the campaign launched. Then the pandemic hit.

The pandemic really stopped us in our tracks because, in order to get on the ballot, we had to be super grassroots. We needed to knock on doors, we needed to be standing outside of grocery stores, we needed to go to churches and early childhood education centers to talk to anyone we could to get their support to get us on the ballot to win that $84 million. What a gut punch to the stomach to be so close to something we’d been working on for so long and to see so much hope and energy from a group of providers and parents who felt neglected by our region for so long.

When that happened we were like, “This is over. We’ll have to figure out another year and time to do this again. There’s no way we can do it amidst the pandemic and not seeing an end in sight.” But we also said, “We need to have conversations. We need to ask our base — mothers, educators, and Black women — ‘What should we do? How do we stay accountable to you all and follow your lead?’” And that’s when they said, “We need this money! This isn’t over. Come up with Plan B.” And we did.

The humbling piece of all of this was the tension of everyday Black folks being failed by the ECE system being at odds with local leaders; equity leaders; and civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. And it’s hard because there are leaders who have large platforms and voices and opinions, and folks who don’t have those can shout something at the top of their lungs and no one hears it. But because the person with the larger platform can get a meeting with a county executive or mayor or can tweet something that gets a few likes, their voice tends to get amplified more than those being failed by our system.

That moment reminded me that we are accountable to everyday Black folks making minimum wage, working hard to educate our babies, working so hard that they can’t give their own children the education they need because it costs too much to go to a center and there aren’t enough centers for them. So asking myself, “What is it that I need to do?” reminded me this is my calling and to stay focused.

We went back to the drawing board and Plan B was to get the county council to get us on the ballot. We had seven council members and needed four to vote in support of the ballot measure. At the top of the day when it was time to vote in April 2020, we had four votes but then found out the ballot language had changed. Our original intent was that the $84 million was 100% for early childhood education and would get equitably allocated to centers and public schools with those most marginalized and directly impacted by systemic racism. And somehow that was not what was to be presented to be voted on.

It was a hard year. And we finally had to say, “It’s not worth pursuing this ballot measure if it doesn’t preserve the integrity of our intentions. If it’s not going to be guaranteed for the early childhood system, then this isn’t for us.” It wasn’t meant to happen, but we still had work to do. A few months later, a measure to secure public funding for early childhood ended up on a ballot in St. Louis City for $2.4 million per year and we pivoted quickly to gear up for that. To go from no public funding to some public funding was still a huge feat in itself.

There’s over a billion-dollar gap for funding in early childhood per year, which is unacceptable. That means there are about 50,000 children every year who don’t get to go to early childhood education programs because there aren’t enough seats. And of the ones who do go, only about 19% of them are subsidized, which means the system really is designed for middle-class to affluent families who can pay their way into a quality center. And what else is pretty alarming is that only about 5% of centers across the city and country are accredited, which is another indicator of quality. So out of 90,000 children, only about 5% have access to a quality early childhood center.

There’s so much data that shows birth to five is the most transformative time of a human’s life. What we do and how we treat our babies is going to leave ripples effects that impact their life trajectory. And what impacts our children impacts not just them but our entire region. This is why a lack of investment in early childhood education is a lack of investment in us being able to create a region that is truly thriving.

There were all these rumors and people conspiracy theorizing around what the campaign was and what WEPOWER was and wasn’t and these accusations that we were against the teachers union and teachers’ rights. Yet, we were doing all this work because we deeply believe in the power of educators and the impact they have on the lives of children. Educators have the most important job there is. And we believe they should have all the rights and benefits in the world. So we had to navigate the noise in spaces that proclaim equity but don’t practice equity.

It was discouraging, but every time we knocked on a door to talk to a voter, we were reminded that this was our base. We were reminded that everyday people all across the city want to see change and want to see an investment in early childhood education. So whenever we felt down we were like, “Let’s go knock on some doors. We are accountable to Black families and communities who have been ignored for generations in this region.” And talking to them reminded us, “You know why you’re here. Don’t get distracted by the noise.” And in the end, we won the city ballot measure in November 2020 after running a very brief and ambitious campaign.

Vanessa was a member of WEPOWER’s Early Childhood Tomorrow Builders Fellowship when 14 fellows came together to work collaboratively with a lot of other organizations and community members to reimagine how early childhood education really functions. And that was part of the catalyst for pursuing the ballot measure because one of the solutions they came up with after hearing from tons of people was that more public funding was needed. So she went from being a fellow to us meeting one day over lunch to just talk about life. And the next thing I knew, she went from being a community leader to a member of the WEPOWER team and leading our economic justice work. Now, after leading early childhood work as a mother and community leader, she ran and has become the first Latina school board member in the history of the Ritenour School District.

It’s been beautiful to see her go from ‘this system needs to change’ to ‘I’m changing the system and it’s going to change because of me wielding my power unapologetically and doing so in my community through a formal seat at the table.’ That’s all great stuff, but the spirit of how she leads is what energizes me. She leads with compassion, with reflection, and with a continuous commitment to learning and growing vulnerably. Every day there’s a new insight she has about the world and how it impacts her and her children. The humanity she brings to her leadership and conversations around shifting systems is just so inspiring. It reminds me that this is the work — creating spaces for folks to recognize their brilliance and activate it in relation to others toward power building for our children.

There’s a lot that happens throughout a WEPOWER cohort. We do a half-day tour through St. Louis City and County to understand the historical context that has impacted the current state of education. And that’s an overwhelming experience to see how many ways policies and racism have divided our region and ultimately harmed our children. We do a session with NCCJ to explore our own identities and how oppression impacts the way we show up and engage with each other along with ways to uncondition that oppression and shift towards a culture of liberation.

What tends to be really pivotal for folks is our data walk where we just blast data on all the walls of a room about the current system. Unfortunately, when you disaggregate the data by race and class, it never evokes happiness and joy. It’s gut-wrenching to see the numbers and disparities. And in most cases, not only are things not changing, they’re getting worse. The more we become a country where the majority are people of color, the more disparity we’re seeing. When we look at everything and step back to realize this is our truth, that shifts folks from curiosity to rage and from rage to action.

I believe in this adrienne maree brown concept and Emergent Strategy principle: trust the people and the people will become trustworthy. We are the solution. We are the answers. Oftentimes, we overcomplicate things. We theorize and try to make sense of complicated visuals and graphics. And if we do this to get there to then get there to get to an outcome to… But the thing is pretty simple. Create a space for folks who are being failed by a system to wrestle with what the best solutions are for themselves, their families, and their communities. And, for me, it’s a testament to all we gotta do is listen and move out the way for folks to lead the change. So I hope to create enough proof points for this to become the new norm and not just be a WEPOWER thing but it becomes as common as the air we breathe. We’re creating the conditions for democracy to become normalized — not something that’s cool or an experiment, but the way we see and solve problems. And we do it in a way in St. Louis that works for us all.

Can you share about the relationships formed from the people of WEPOWER coming together?

The first WEPOWER cohort has been amazing to see because those women have become inseparable. I was just talking with four of our original power builders. They were the first community leaders with WEPOWER who kicked off a campaign advocating for Saint Louis Public Schools to increase budget transparency and equity in 2018. Most of them did not know each other. They just came because we called and said, “Please come to this program.” Now, a few years later, they’re best friends. They’re sisters. They see each other, work with each other, talk with each other. They pray for each other. And at the end of the day, they support each other. It’s magical the way they’ve built a community amongst themselves. Recently, they were canvassing in North St. Louis to get feedback from residents on the vision for what it looks like to build wealth in neighborhoods. And they were recruiting people to join the next round of our Power-Building Academy.

On a Saturday night, Miss Linda called me and said, “Now I’m calling you to preach to you. I don’t want to sound like your mom, but I’m doing this because I love you.” And she gave me all these pieces of advice about what we need to do at WEPOWER. I told her, “You know what? You’re right. That’s all great stuff.” And really the name is perfect because it’s the power of we. It’s not like I’m just in this room making decisions, but it’s the collective. It’s all of us bringing our experiences and wisdom together to say, “How do we make the sum greater than the individual parts?” Now I’m thinking every day about how we can start to act on those things Miss Linda told me that night. And when she came in on Monday to get some more material for canvassing, she asked, “You remember my name, right?” I looked at her and giggled in disbelief at her question. “Yes, Miss Linda.” She was like, “No. Mama!” She’s a jokester. So I’ve been calling her that. And it speaks to the community we’re building that’s rooted in joy and fun but also a commitment to each other and our future.

The Power-Building Academy is about electoral and issue-based organizing. Tomorrow Builders is about reimagining the system. Chisholm's Chair gets Black and Latinx women ready for public office. Those three programs are made up of almost 300 community members. And then we’ll launch our next round of leadership programming soon too.

There’s an organization in Arizona called LUCHA - Living United for Change in Arizona that pretty much led the effort to flip Arizona blue. All the things we saw that felt like they came out of nowhere in Arizona during the 2020 Presidential election were in part due to their leadership through years of grassroots power-building, community building, and base building. So they’re the dream. LUCHA’s led by these two dope Latino and Latina leaders who are co-executive directors. We’ve met with them and with other folks who have worked with them. And every time we learn more about them, it’s like that’s what we’re trying to build here in St. Louis — a powerful community made of thousands of folks fighting for their own liberation, winning, and doing it so unapologetically.

I remember them telling a story of how they kicked off a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage in Arizona and everyone told them, “You’re crazy. Don’t do it. We’re not giving you any money to do it.” And they were like, “We don’t care if you tell us not to do it and we don’t care if you’re not gonna give us money. We’re going to win regardless.” So without any support from traditional progressives, they ran that ballot measure and they won. Their story and evolution are a reminder for me to keep going, remember who your base is, stay focused on staying accountable to them, and to do unflinching things that need to happen.

Your CBN award is for growing in equity and antiracism, and this work has been pumping through your veins for a while now. What does it mean to you to receive this award?

The work continues. I live in North St. Louis and I’ve lived here my whole life. It’s exciting to celebrate receiving an award that acknowledges a commitment to equity, so I’m grateful for that. But it’s hard to celebrate an award about equity when the outcomes haven’t shifted yet. Every day I wake up, I’m reminded that we have so much work to do. And a lot of activities don’t mean outcomes are shifting. Every day I’m questioning, “How do I do the best I can to at least feel like we’re on track to shift outcomes?” What Forward Through Ferguson’s done is a great job of reminding the region that racial equity’s not a feeling, it’s an outcome. So folks are recognizing we can do this differently and achieve success in the process. And I still go to sleep at night wondering, “How close are we to moving beyond discussion and activity to people’s lives measurably changing?”

If you could take some of the hurts and pains away, what would they be?

Status quo. St. Louis has a way of being conditioned to fiercely and proudly protect stability over progress. And we can be risk-averse at times and it shows up in many ways that divide us. Folks who I would have hoped we could be in community with and that WEPOWER could have been collaborative with have actually been our biggest critics. There’s nothing wrong with critique, but I do find it discouraging that we get stuck there instead of finding enough common ground to move forward. There’s just too much at stake here. There are too many folks being killed every day, too many folks being failed by the education system, too many folks living in poverty beyond comprehension for us to get bogged down in politics. I wish we could remove ego. I wish we could have uncomfortable conversations and be okay with disagreeing but still discuss, “What’s the one thing we can commit to together so we can move something forward for the sake of our children and our future?”

What are the North stars that WEPOWER holds on tight to for how people can think about growing in equity and antiracism work?

Vulnerability, truth-telling, and data. Vulnerability is being okay with saying, “We messed up. We don’t have the answers.” Or, “I don’t know. Can you help us figure this out?” Vulnerability looks like this is what didn’t work this time, so this is what we’re going to do next time. Vulnerability with sharing how we’re feeling in a moment, being in a space where we can process our emotions, where people can cry but laugh at the same time. That culture of vulnerability has really allowed us to navigate everything internally as a team but also with our community members. 

For truth-telling and data, it’s hard to refute the data even though people try. The data is so alarming but also so honest. We use it to hold ourselves accountable. We are committed to shifting these outcomes because Black and Brown communities deserve not just to have people saying the right things, but for their quality of life to change. We do have a unique way of holding up data and saying, “This is the current state of things and we’re going to be pursuing solutions that will shift these data points.” We don’t just look at the data, but we say when something is unacceptable. We’ve done that in the early childhood and K-12 educational spaces. We get push back, but we don’t stop. We leverage data to continuously create a sense of urgency so more folks understand that Black and Brown folks deserve better than these data points.

When’s a time you had to be vulnerable in the work you do?

It’s not that I had to be, but that there are moments when I couldn’t help myself. My vulnerability usually isn’t calculated. I’m at the tipping point, at the edge. And you’re seeing me as I am.

What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?

A ballerina or a civil rights attorney. Although I do wonder what it would be like to live in New York and travel the world dancing, I think it makes perfect sense to be where I am right now.  Since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to my community. And my community’s here — it’s Fairground Park and O’Fallon Park. So I’m just grateful that I get the privilege to be here and pursue my dreams and see them come to life with my neighbors. I think it’s exactly where I need to be. It’s so, so, so hard, even traumatizing, and there are definitely days when it feels like, “You need to go somewhere else, Charli.” But I’m not giving up.

- Charli Cooksey, Founder and CEO of WEPOWER

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like the WEPOWER team at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building

Congratulations to the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, recipient of our 2021 Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building!

The Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:

• Demonstrates incredible commitment to working through partnerships, even when it’s more challenging than “going it alone.”

• Forges new connections that bridge gaps between people, organizations, and places that don’t normally interact with each other in the St. Louis region.

• Shows up for others and participates directly in their work; does not only ask or expect that partners and collaborators come to them.

• Approaches difficulty and conflict with understanding, compassion, and an open mind.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative, to learn more about him and his team’s work. Here’s some of what Peter had to say.

Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

When I went to law school, I knew I wanted to do public interest work but I didn’t know what it meant. Anytime you’re in school, it’s an opportunity to try new things. Well, my first year I had an internship with a public defender in Kansas City where I got to work on pretty heavy stuff like murder trials. One of the defendants we represented was a young man about my age. I’d visit the client for hours on end, I got to know them, and we had a lot in common. There I was in school, being able to move up the ladder or whatever, but he grew up in a very different neighborhood than I did and didn’t have access to all the opportunities I had. I got emotionally invested trying to defend that client and do right by them. 

It wasn’t an ideal outcome. He’s probably still in prison and here I am now getting to do work that I love. I wonder how much of that is because of where we each grew up, how our environments shaped us, and what we had access to or didn’t. And as soon as that case was closed, the very next client who came in was also someone not that different in age and who grew up in a neighborhood without much access to opportunities. As important as that internship was, I wondered if there was a way to use my legal education or a career in public interest to help work with communities to create more opportunity.

My second year of law school, I interned with Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Economic Development Unit in Kansas City. Eventually, I told them, “I’m not going away. I love the work so much. You’re gonna have to pay me.” Things worked out when somebody left the team, a spot opened up, and I applied. I was fortunate to find that program in Kansas City because they used Missouri law. They represented neighborhoods in court and used legal tools to reclaim vacant properties. And I remember one of the first weeks of my internship reading over some laws and thinking, “This all applies to St. Louis too. At some point, I’m gonna get back there and work with neighborhoods to help get vacant houses fixed up.” I took that legal support for neighborhoods model that we had done to create opportunities for neighborhoods through legal assistance and returned to St. Louis eight years later to do the same work here.

Our team represents community groups, so our clients are usually neighborhood associations or community development corporations. We provide a variety of services, but a big focus is on representing them in court to use state laws that allow neighborhoods to acquire vacant and abandoned property. A lot of the litigation we do on behalf of neighborhood associations is aimed at absentee landowners or property owners. They may only exist on paper, so it’s hard for the City to hold those owners accountable in court. And when there’s an LLC or large entity, or the owner is dead, municipal code enforcement has its limitations. That’s when we identify properties that fit certain criteria, file a lawsuit in court, get legal access to the houses, clear off some of the liens, and find somebody in the neighborhood who wants to rehab or buy the homes.

Legal Services of Eastern Missouri’s Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative team (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

We started the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative in 2018 with support from the City through the St. Louis Development Corporation and The Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. As you can imagine, some of the cases and work are very labor-intensive. We can’t do it all ourselves. So there’s me, Latasha, and Rachel as the three attorneys; Melissa and Brittany as the paralegals; and we have a ton of pro-bono volunteers. We’ve partnered large law firms with neighborhood associations so they can bring more cases and handle more matters. And with all the expertise big firms have with sometimes hundreds of lawyers, they help serve residents of low- and middle-income neighborhoods here. So we do corporate governance work, problem property litigation, and real estate related services for residents, including free beneficiary deeds for homeowners.

One of the big reasons for vacancies is property abandonment. People will die without any estate plan, there’s not a lawyer in the community, or they don’t have the resources to make a will or draft and record a beneficiary deed or have a plan for their assets when they go. As a result, the default rule in Missouri is that when you die, if you don’t say what you want to happen, the title is split among all your heirs. So if any of those heirs want to get a bank loan, sell the place, or start fixing it up themselves, then they’ve got to go to a lawyer, they’ve got to go through probate, and it can take years and cost thousands of dollars. A lot of times if this occurs in a neighborhood where the property values aren’t so high or a house needs work, it’s not even worth it and the place is just abandoned. It’s so heartbreaking. But one little piece of paper can prevent all of that from being lost.

I remember having a client tell me her parents had to drive two states away to find a bank to make a loan for their family to buy a house. In the ’50s and ’60s and still today, there are so many barriers to homeownership. Somebody not having a simple transfer-on-death deed can lead a family to lose their home as an asset. We’ll take referrals from the neighborhood groups who send us families. Maybe a family is living in Mom’s house, Mom died, they’re paying the taxes and taking care of it, but they’re not in the title. So we help fix some issues. We also do regular clinics to make sure people have access to estate planning documents. We can only do so much ourselves, and that’s why we bring in other resources as we do with pro-bono partnerships so we’re able to do more.

In the last three years, we’ve opened about 300 cases, done about 50 estate planning or title consolidation cases per year, and we do about 50 problem property cases per year where we affirmatively file lawsuits with respect to vacant and abandoned properties. There are over 20,000 vacant properties in the City of St. Louis, and maybe the City owns about half. The other half is owned by people who have long been dead or LLCs in which who knows where the owners are. We have to look at each property and untangle it like a knot or a big ball of yarn. 

Each property is different and each item behind why the property is vacant or abandoned needs to be sorted out before that property can be put back into productive use. So we work with neighborhoods to identify their priorities and what they want us to work on. They point and say, “It’s this one next to the school. It’s this one next to the bus stop. It’s this one on this block where we want to put a park or community garden.” In each neighborhood, we figure out what their priorities are and start untangling that knot.

During the day, we wear our lawyer hats and untie these knots, property by property. Then we all also give a lot of our time to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, working with City departments and other non-profit service providers to come up with big-picture solutions. And for us, that’s another way to get that same goal. Yes, we can solve problems in the immediate sense, but is that going to fix systemic things long-term? We need to focus on other types of advocacy, collaborations, and policy.

Doing the work you do with housing and real estate and being from St. Louis, what are you thinking about as you’re seeing all the vacant houses when you drive through the City?

I’m always working. My partner’s probably used to it now because it’s been almost 12 years doing this work, but I’ll always be looking for addresses. I have an app on my phone. I know how to look up who the owner is. I get the parcel number. And then when I get home, I go into the City's land title system. So it’s just constant. There are 10,000 problems to solve all over. When I drive around, it’s like, “I wonder how that property got to be that way? What is the story behind that one?” They’re often terribly tragic: someone died, there was a fire, somebody was evicted. But in order to take that property and turn it into something positive, you have to understand how it got there in the first place to fix the problems associated with the title and then try to push the place back out to somebody who can do something with it. We’ve got a lot of stories like this because we do like 50 of these cases a year. There’s this physical blight that you see, but then there’s this hidden legal blight. That’s where our team really gets into it. Like, “What are all of the other issues that aren’t visible but just as much of a barrier to solving a problem as fixing up the roof or windows or whatever it is?”

People from Saint Louis University School of Law, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, and Community Builders Network did a forum on vacant properties in 2016. They asked me to come to St. Louis to talk about what we were doing about them in Kansas City. That’s when I met some of my future friends, colleagues, and collaborators. And one of them was Tonnie Glispie-Smith, who won a CBN award in 2020 and is really involved in the West End Neighborhood Association. She’d call me when I still lived in Kansas City and ask, “What do you think about this property? How about this other one?” So it made it easy to know that there would be neighborhoods that could benefit from this type of assistance.

One of the first cases she ever asked me about was a duplex in the West End. It had long been vacant more than 10 or 15 years and they had tried everything to get that house fixed up. They tried calling the Citizens’ Service Bureau, calling the police, talking to the alderperson. They just couldn’t make anything happen. They found buyers who wanted to purchase that property and fix it up. And it was just a terrible situation — a violent situation happened inside the place while vacant, it was really overgrown, people found guns and drugs inside and out. It was a nightmare for those who lived around there.

Well, we started looking at it and untangling the knot. We found there were actually two parcels of land — one from the family the owner inherited and the other he purchased from the LRA long ago. And even when the neighborhood would send interested buyers, he had a title issue because when he took the title to that property, there was a mistake in the legal description. So Tonnie told me, “If I have this property owner call you, can you help him? He wants to sell it. He just can’t. He’s stuck with it.”

We went through 20 or 30 years of records to figure out what the issue was and it turned out the title problem was preventing the property from being sold. The guy was a senior and a veteran and just couldn’t afford an attorney. It would have cost a good chunk of change he didn’t have. So we worked with the owner to fix it and he was able to sell the house. He wasn’t being prosecuted in housing court anymore. He wasn’t spending tons of money having to secure the property. He sold it and got some money out of it. And now the house is fully renovated or pretty close. So that was an early win for us.

Ya know, sometimes we’re the stick and we’ll file a case against an absentee property owner. But that was a case where we got to be the carrot. We were the good guy and we got to help that owner fix the title issue to sell it.

How do you see the trickle-down effect of that story impact the community and the street?

Disinvestment is contagious. Vacancy is contagious. When one house becomes or is vacant, it takes a negative toll emotionally on the people living nearby. Like, “Why should I keep putting money into my house? I’m never gonna get it out because my property value’s always gonna be hurt by that vacant property across the street. Why should I even care?” But the opposite is also true. So when somebody sees a house being renovated, it’s like, “Yeah! Things are moving in the right direction.” It makes people feel more comfortable and want to invest in their own community. It inspires hope. This property’s not just stuck in this terrible purgatory anymore. There’s going to be a new homeowner soon and new kids on the street and more money for the school district and eyes on the street if someone needs help or something. More people help to build community because they can now call that neighborhood or house or block ‘home.’

Who owns these abandoned properties you and your team file lawsuits against to force them to  sell or repair their home and why might they not want to sell it?

Sometimes the owner is just stuck and sometimes the owner just doesn’t want to do anything. Occasionally, we’ll encounter an owner who says, “No, this house of mine is not a problem,” when all the other facts say that it is: there have been all kinds of break-ins, the property’s caught on fire, it’s collapsing. And an owner will say, “I don’t care. I don’t want to fix anything up. I’m not gonna sell it. I’m not gonna demolish it. I’m not gonna donate it. You just have to take me to court.” And we will do that over and over and over again. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

There are few reasons why people don’t budge. They might have an emotional connection to a property. They might not want to let it go because maybe it was Grandma’s house. So when the neighborhood is negotiating with an owner, or we’re doing it as their attorney, it’s like, “If that house means so much to you, wouldn’t it mean more to have a new family be able to live in it and enjoy it? Because if you don’t do anything, it’s gonna fall over or the City’s going to demolish it. What does that do for that memory you’re holding onto?”

Then there are owners who have a higher opinion of the property’s value than what they think it is. Maybe they overpaid and they’re embarrassed and don’t want to realize they made a bad investment. It’s the sunk-cost fallacy. So they hold on to it thinking something’s eventually going to happen and the house is going to be worth something. But that’s just not the case most of the time. If that house collapses in on itself and it’s demolished, it’s not going to be worth anything. Maybe the lot will be worth something, but not much and probably not in the foreseeable future. So sometimes it’s the economics of people not wanting to give up thinking they can still make money off of it.

I had a case where this guy’s dad’s house was going to collapse. So the neighborhood association found someone to buy it, like, “We think it’s a fair price. You can negotiate.” And the owner said, “It’s not for sale.” He agreed that the price was fair. And if it was any other house, he would have sold it. But he really wanted to make sure his dad’s legacy and place in the neighborhood and community were valued. Well, the neighborhood had an orchard. And they said, “If you can figure out a price for that house so somebody can buy it and fix it up, we can put a bench in our orchard and dedicate it to your dad so his memory always has a place to live on in the neighborhood. And you’ll have a place where you can go to visit that isn’t the abandoned house anymore.” So there are ways to get creative without money or being cutthroat. But every property has a different story behind it and we have to figure out why it is the way it is.

How do you and your team celebrate a win?

Our work is different than a lot of legal aid work. Legal aid is providing assistance to people often at the lowest point in their lives. So we have 80 to 100 attorneys who do things like provide orders of protection for victims of domestic violence, represent tenants in eviction cases, help people get badly needed public benefits. We’re fortunate in that our cases are a bit more optimistic and definitely more visual because we deal with real estate and property. We’ve been working with a photographer who’s helping us document all of our cases and all the befores, afters, and durings. What have we done in our first three or four years? Hopefully, instead of just 300 cases in a report, we’ll have a visual marker to celebrate the milestones. These are real stories and transformations that we should have in print somewhere to show that these tools work. And that’ll be a great way to look back on everything we’ve done, take stock, and be proud. This isn’t overnight work. This takes years and years. Some of the properties we’ve worked with in year one are just coming back on the market.

Were you surprised to get the award this year for collaboration and coalition building?

I didn’t go to my law school graduation. All that award stuff has never really been for me. But this is different because it’s a Community Builders Network award. It’s from our friends, collaborators, people we work with all the time, and it just means a lot. Community development work is really hard. And people know that. We certainly don’t do this work for the money. It is a labor of love for everybody involved and we’re passionate about it. One thing that needs to be celebrated is how hard the work is but how people continue to do it despite the challenges and uncertainty.

- Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative team at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.