Doug Nelson
Former President and CEO
Annie E. Casey Foundation
(1990-2010)
Former Chairman
Living Cities Board of Directors
(2003-2006)

For almost 25 years, I—and my colleagues at the Annie E. Casey Foundation—have embraced the conviction that making positive change in the nation’s most troubled urban neighborhoods is a necessary predicate to our primary mission of improving the futures for America’s most disadvantaged children and families. And while we have long been clear about the importance of this premise, we were—especially at the outset—far less clear about how to act on it.

Foundations, cities, the federal government and social reformers have been grappling with the same issues for nearly a century. Over the course of this long history, much has been learned, and much real progress has been achieved. But it is also true that finding a clear path to genuinely transformative, lasting and replicable change—especially change that can dramatically improve outcomes for low-income neighborhood residents—has proven to be frustratingly elusive.

The problem—to oversimplify it—was that most of the 20th century community change investments, by both foundations and government, were too little in amount, too short in duration, too narrow in focus, and too disconnected from other potential public and private sector investments to successfully redirect the downward trajectory of the most troubled urban communities.

Of course, it is far easier to identify the insufficiencies of past community change initiatives than it is to imagine, design and test new strategies capable of overcoming those limitations. And the fact is, no single foundation, no one intermediary, no government agency, no community organization, nor no single private investor could alone ever deliver the scale, the breadth of expertise, the leverage, and bear the burden of risk that had come to be seen as necessary for successfully catalyzing meaningful and lasting neighborhood transformation.

It was this realization that first inspired the collaborative that became Living Cities—and it is this realization that still gives Living Cities its distinct and extraordinary significance as an institution. In 1991, Living Cities (then known as the National Community Development Initiative, or NCDI) was created for the express purpose of scaling up, enlarging, and coordinating long-term financial support to selected community development organizations in a cross-section of U.S. cities. For the first time, the country’s major community development-oriented national foundations not only agreed to pool significant grant resources. They also jointly devised a structure to coordinate those funds with federal program dollars and private sector community lending —all done through the shared intermediaries of LISC and Enterprise.

NCDI, from the beginning, stood out as both an unprecedented model of serious philanthropic and corporate collaboration and a noteworthy example of the potential of foundations to help leverage and target greater private and public investment into poor communities. The early results of this novel experiment were impressive: NCDI investments clearly accelerated the production of affordable housing units and measurably strengthened the capacity of community development corporations (CDCs) in its target cities.

But perhaps even more importantly, NCDI’s operations created an increasingly sophisticated learning community among its diverse member institutions. By the late 1990s, reflection on the impact of NCDI’s initial rounds of funding led the organization to incrementally broaden its focus beyond housing and CDC capacity-building toward a more comprehensive investment and intervention strategy that embraced institutional change, reform of multiple systems, and greater human capital investment.

This commitment to explore an even more ambitious and comprehensive approach to urban redevelopment constituted a critical turning point in the evolution of Living Cities. By 2005, it was evident to me (and others) that Living Cities could become more than just a powerful vehicle for collaborative funding— it could actually become a one-of-a-kind forum or laboratory in which the nation’s leading advocates for cities could pool their experience, expertise, imagination, knowledge, resources, and political influence in order to accelerate the adoption of innovative policies, practices, programs, and financing strategies truly capable of restoring health to severely troubled neighborhoods.

That vision of what we might become underlay the far reaching strategic renewal plan that Living Cities members adopted in 2008.

Much has been achieved in these last few years to affirm the high expectations set for Living Cities. Our membership has grown in number and influence; we have increased our grant, PRI, and loan dollars significantly; and our role as field leader, convener, and policy advocate has never been stronger. Furthermore, Living Cities activities during the last couple of years, such as its Capital Formation work and the new Integration Initiative, contain within them the potential to dramatically retool and scale-up the next generation of community development investments.

Of course, we still have much to learn and much to prove. But I honestly believe that no organization—no collection of people or institutions—is better positioned than Living Cities to design and implement truly breakthrough change strategies for urban American communities.