India Pierce Lee
Program Director Neighborhoods, Housing and Community Development
The Cleveland Foundation

My first introduction to Living Cities, then known as the National Community Development Initiative (NCDI), was in 1991, when the Cleveland Enterprise Foundation office invited the executive directors from several of the community development corporations (CDCs) to discuss the needs in the community development system in Cleveland. We met with Jim Pickman and others who were interested in what we thought was working and where gaps existed in our system. Our collective interest was in building the infrastructure and capacity that would create strong leadership within the CDCs. There was also a push to get CDCs to think in a more strategic and focused manner to create a streamlined production system that could move to scale for housing and commercial development to systematically redevelop and transform neighborhoods.

Cleveland was in a unique position to leverage national capacity and resources with strong local support. In 1988, through the support of Cleveland Tomorrow and local foundations, Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI) was established as the local intermediary to provide technical assistance and prioritize financial support to the CDCs for neighborhood-based development and capacity building. The culmination of the Living Cities support, through Enterprise Foundation and with the local Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) office, enhanced the ability to leverage critical resources to build the capacity and the type of infrastructure necessary to strengthen the community development system. As a Living Cities community, Cleveland had the opportunity to demonstrate how resources could be leveraged to provide support nationally and locally for neighborhoods.

For the next decade, Cleveland’s community development corporations became stronger and more sophisticated.

This was evident several years ago, when the Living Cities Board of Directors voted to accept The Cleveland Foundation in as its first community foundation and affiliate member. This type of integration and diversity of the Living Cities membership provides a deeper dialogue as to how to invest and deploy grants and capital in different markets across the Living Cities footprint.