Improving Quality of Life Neighborhood by Neighborhood

There is more than one way to build up social capital systematically. In our first blog post, we unpacked the definition and purpose of social capital, and we looked at how Community Renewal International fosters social capital block by block in Shreveport.

In this post, we’ll discover another model that has gradually transformed Houston neighborhoods. Although its model is quite different from CRI, BakerRipley also emphasizes the necessity of growing social capital neighborhood by neighborhood for improving the quality of life. It focuses on low-income neighborhoods—places typically seen only as a collection of problems that need solving rather than as sources of leadership and assets for promoting change.

Angela Blanchard grew the organization multifold over 20 years as its leader, making it the largest charitable organization in Texas. In her chapter in Investing in What Works in America’s Communities, she writes:

You can’t build on broken. In the past, many communities were demoralized by formulas that forced them to show up on the bread lines of government assistance, proving first that they were sufficiently broken to require help. It did not work. It will not work. We have to capture instead the deep longing of people to better themselves, to nurture their children, to learn and to contribute—that is what fuels a sustainable approach to community development.

The organization uses what it calls “Appreciative Community Building” to uncover each neighborhood’s strengths before working side by side with residents to connect them with their neighbors and develop a plan to advance their area. It starts with hundreds of hours of individual and focus group interviews and community meetings with a wide range of people in a neighborhood—long-term residents, new arrivals, elected officials, religious leaders, business owners, and school educators. This research ascertains what issues a neighborhood prioritizes and what relationship networks, skills, and leaders already exist.

The next step is a “Community Voices Report,” which BakerRipley presents at a public meeting. This effort helps reframe the way people inside and outside the neighborhood perceive it—raising expectations and changing norms in the process. The organization then asks leading members of the neighborhood to come together to forge a common vision and create action teams that, with the help of staff, plan how that vision can be fulfilled.

BakerRipley trains the leaders who emerge from this process and gives them significant roles, such as providing input into projects as they are planned and implemented.It emphasizes leadership development to bolster the neighborhood’s capacity to work together internally and to reach out to other parts of the city to advance its goals. BakerRipley trains local leaders to navigate and take advantage of politics. This marks a cultural change among the residents it works with, who tend not to get involved politically. They can now pursue local politics to better their communities—another way to build social capital.

Only after greater social capital is evident does BakerRipley invest its resources and develop targeted funding streams to meet the needs of a neighborhood. Across all its locales, the organization agglomerates money from 37 different federal, state, and local programs (including education labor, health, housing, and urban development) to serve its neighborhoods with a wide range of services, including, in many cases, the construction of a multipurpose community center. “First you build the community, then you build the center,” Blanchard says.

In East Aldine, for example, BakerRipley’s interviews discovered a cohesive neighborhood with a clear identity, but one that had been marginalized because the city of Houston annexed the better off areas nearby and left it to take care of itself. (East Aldine is a state management district.) Residents were self-reliant and cooperative—neighbors helped each other, businesses lent to each other, volunteers were plentiful, and those who prospered invested in the area and supported communal activities. Residents possessed a lot of resourcefulness and entrepreneurism and exhibited pride in the products and services that local businesses created. Children were dropping out of school, not due to a lack of interest or academic or behavioral problems, but because they worked in the family business as translators and cashiers. “When working closely with East Aldine residents and leaders, we learned of their desire to use their talents and skills to create businesses and ideas,” reports BakerRipley President and CEO Claudia Aguirre.

These findings led BakerRipley to help neighborhood businesses with training and connect them to additional resources. In partnership with Chevron and the Fab Foundation, BakerRipley established a fabrication laboratory (first in Houston) to enable entrepreneurs to use better tools, learn from each other, and connect with professionals from elsewhere in the region. The organization also developed educational programs that enabled the kids to participate in ways that did not disturb the contributions they were making outside of school. A three-building, eight-acre site will (in addition to its other services) house all the economic opportunity expansion programs, including adult education, small business development, STEM classes for youth, and workforce skills training—a community center unlike any other in Houston.

As with Community Renewal International, replication that remains place-based is one of BakerRipley’s goals.

BakerRipley has successfully replicated its model across the city and surrounding suburbs, reaching a scale that few if any place-based nonprofits ever achieve. It now has more than 60 sites that serve more than half a million people and an annual budget of more than $250 million.

Our next and final blog post will summarize lessons learned from both CRI and BakerRipley—lessons that other place-based organizations can consider in their own programming and outreach.