When you know better, do better

Last month, our team held listening sessions as a first step for the creation of our department’s annual report. In the grounding presentation by my colleague Sarah Milnar , she shared a well-known quote from Maya Angelou: 

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” 

We should inscribe this quote on the first page of any introductory community development textbook as a mission for our work. Looking back over my career, I can say we have done better in our practice. At the start, community benefit was the end product. Well intentioned practitioners had the goal of reactivating a building or developing a piece of real estate. Their main partners were developers, bankers, public funders, anchor tenant companies, and well-healed community leaders. That select group made the decisions and completed the project. The development was the community benefit. The development produced trickle down benefits to community. That was the approach. 

In many cases, this approach worked and in others it did not. 1980s Minneapolis experienced a transformational development boom, realizing billions of dollars of development in the core. The tremendous success of that era not only reset downtown into the economic engine of the State, it produced almost $400 million of surplus cash to fund the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, or NRP, for more than 20 years. We might recognize the advent of NRP as our collective inflection point where community begin to expect membership in the select community development group. Unlike the prevailing practice of the billion-dollar years in the 1980s and its top-down approach, NRP was ground up, each of Minneapolis 87 neighborhoods received direct allocations to fund community-identified strategies.

The effect the NRP infection point would have impact on our overall community development process. However, that transition would take decades to reset the muscle memory of us practitioners, a transformation that continues to this day.   

This week, Rebecca Parrell led a pre-proposal conference for the reuse of the Peoples’ Way in George Floyd Square. The conference was the next step to find a community-minded development partner who can guide this very important community space in alignment with the community’s vision. Our process at Peoples’ Way is the most recent example of how far we have come as a profession. At the Peoples’ Way, instead of working directly with a developer and banker, we started with community visioning workshops, building into technical study based on what we heard, both provided the structure for a request for qualifications, or RFQ. 

An RFQ (submission due November 22, 2024) is different than a more conventional request for proposals, or RFP. An RFP asks the development community to show a finished product concept based of stated development objectives in a take-it-or-leave-it decision which places power in the hands of the developer. In a RFQ process we are looking for a partner to work on an unfinished concept with the City and community following articulated community values in an iterative process which places power in the hands of community.

At George Floyd Square, community determined the values which guide our process at Peoples’ Way. These include harm repair, respect for the site’s significance, community-centering in the process and outcomes, and honoring George Floyd and his life, and respecting the square as international memorial space. Alexander Kado has led this process for the City team with help from Heidi M. Garrido and Mary Altman with Anthony Taylor and Atum Azzahir of the Cultural Wellness Center.

Our intentional approach of community-centered decision making at Peoples’ Way responds both to community demands and reflects the evolution of our practice from the 1009s inflection point. Community development organizations across the county ask “who benefits and who’s impacted” by a decision more often. We see this transformation at the New Nicollet project which includes a City-Council approved engagement framework document and project expectations. These documents, spearheaded by Adrienne Bockheim, AICP , identify and acknowledge the importance of people with the most to lose from this project at the beginning of the process.

We also see it in the 2021 approved Upper Harbor Coordinated Plan. This plan is a product of increasing demands to amend an in-flight process, where community power to influence was unclear. Hilary Holmes , Ann Calvert, and JoAnna Hicks led a community process with our development partner Brandon Champeau and Tom Strohm and community partners James Trice and J. DeVon Nolen to deliver a plan which aims to maximize community benefits. These investments are now starting at the site. I will write more about this important maturation in a future article.

Once, our best was developing a building as the first answer to community need, the deal was to objective. That approach produced benefits to many but poverty and disparities remained in areas of investments. We heard from people impacted by but not helped by these deals. It took a long time to hear them and we still don’t hear everyone. Now, our best is to start with people. Those who are most impacted by the decisions and realizing outcomes for them is the objective. We know better now and try with every process to do better for people.