Mtamanika Youngblood
President & CEO
Sustainable Neighborhood Development Strategies, inc.

Board Chair and Former President
Historic District Development Corporation
Atlanta, Georgia

My initial exposure to Living Cities began in the mid-1990s. At the time I was the executive director of a fledgling non-profit, the Historic District Development Corporation (HDDC). Its mission was to revitalize the neighborhood immediately surrounding the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic District near downtown Atlanta. As HDDC’s relationship with Living Cities grew, it resulted in critical operational and project funding over several years through the Atlanta office of the Enterprise Foundation.

While the monetary support was welcome and certainly needed, of perhaps greater value to me personally was the opportunity to participate in national conferences and leadership activities. These connected my local efforts to a much larger, multi-level, and diversified effort to achieve community transformation on a macro scale. It also resulted in beneficial exposure.

By definition, attempts to transform neighborhoods are locally focused. This work usually targets a small fraction of the overall community, sometimes just a few city blocks. It is intense and grinding, the everyday parameters of which are fairly narrow. Living Cities has advanced the industry by supporting a cohesive, national perspective to neighborhood transformation. It has brought together all the key players—funders, research organizations, government and activists —in a way that national policy and grassroots activity are more closely linked and are therefore more effective. This is an industry-altering shift, one that has brought cohesion and coherence to work that benefits from being connected to other similar efforts taking place across the country.

Living Cities also is a valued partner in my current community development work. Sustainable Neighborhood Development Strategies, Inc. (SNDSI) is addressing two of the most complex and challenging issues currently facing community developers: the foreclosure crisis, and the need to retool our housing stock to reduce operating costs by achieving affordability and greater energy and resource conservation. Once again, Living Cities has demonstrated that it “gets it,” and has been instrumental in moving the industry forward on these issues, providing timely leadership and tangible support, such as the grant recently awarded SNDSI to enhance its financial infrastructure and management capabilities.

By setting high benchmarks for national policy, encouraging multi-level collaborations, and helping channel resources where they do the most good as well as generate the greatest overall return for dollars invested, Living Cities has clearly advanced the practice of community development. As a community development professional I can attest that its efforts have had a direct impact on my effectiveness by bringing a wider array of much needed resources to bear on both persistent and emergent problems. This is a positive contribution to the practice of philanthropy and to creating a more just and equitable society.