Reaching Your Community's Roots

Historically, community foundations have worked to create change by making grants to local nonprofits, advocacy groups, and other organizations.

But a new breed of funders is showing how, by serving in yet another role, they can foster change that is more comprehensive, more responsive to residents’ needs, and, hopefully, more enduring. This role involves reaching into the very roots of the community to its people, and empowering them.

That’s the approach that Fairfield County’s Community Foundation -- a community foundation based in southwest Connecticut -- is taking with its PT Partners initiative, a model for engaging and training public housing residents to lead change in their neighborhoods.

PT Partners is housed at PT Barnum Apartments, a 360-unit public housing development in Bridgeport, Connecticut surrounded by a notorious brownfield and, incongruously, a yacht club. Long known for crime and poverty, PT Barnum is home to more than 1,100 children and adults. The goal of PT Partners is to make PT Barnum a safer, healthier, and overall better home for its residents—to transform it into a community of equity, opportunity, and empowerment. Residents are the majority stakeholder owners of the PT Partners initiative and are responsible for driving community change. After all, they are the experts on their community and its needs and desires.

But they needed to know their own power—and they needed to learn how to assert it.

With a Partners in Progress grant from The Citi Foundation and The Low Income Investment Fund, we provided civic engagement training to about a dozen of our residents, all women and mostly single mothers. The Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition conducted a three-part training, a sort of “Civic Engagement 101” that included how to create an advocacy statement and how to use that statement to get the attention of elected officials; what to do at a meeting with elected officials; and how to give testimony.

It was amazing to see how these women found their voices—and used them. For example, at a meeting with the mayor about a proposal to replace the nearby brownfield with a hydroponic greenhouse, a resident raised her hand to ask the mayor if he could help make recycling bins available to residents. Newly empowered residents are also learning how to work as a team and are growing their group of advocates, bringing in more women who previously were fence-sitters. An important issue for the group: education. Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition has a grant from the Bridgeport Board of Education to provide social and emotional wellness training for parents and school faculty members, as well as support through our Partners in Progress/Citi Foundation grant to extend the civic engagement trainings to include a “train the trainer” workshop for PT resident participants.

In addition, PT residents have been organizing to inform the creation of a new magnet academy that will serve PT Barnum elementary and middle school children. At the old neighborhood school, parents had little to no involvement. Since the Parent Education Organizing initiative launched last summer, the number of parents engaged with planning the new school has doubled. With parent support and direction, the Geraldine Claytor Magnet Academy will be a critical asset to the community, built on student-driven learning and a Science-Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM) curriculum.

Previously, our residents distrusted civic systems. Now several have gained the confidence and the tools they need to demand change. For example, with support from Fairfield County’s Community Foundation, residents are working to rid their community of the noxious brownfield next door and replace it with a state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouse. If the greenhouse project goes through, it will bring both fresh produce and good jobs to the community, both of which are currently scarce, and eliminate a toxic blight.

The way we see it, this is just the beginning of a community transformation led by the community itself. Too many programs are done to communities and not for them. If change is really to benefit communities, accountability must be to the residents of those communities. There is no accountability and no sustainability for an initiative if residents don’t own it. This is a new paradigm for community foundations. It requires us to think and work differently. Under this paradigm, Fairfield County’s Community Foundation is more than a grantmaker; it has become a catalyst for community-led change.

I urge all foundations that want to create equity and opportunity in their communities to step into this very exciting and rewarding role.