2021 Award for Resident Leadership

Congratulations to Sundy Whiteside, recipient of our 2021 Award for Resident Leadership! Sundy is a resident of the Walnut Park East neighborhood, Board President of the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO), and Co-Chair of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative's Vacancy Advisory Committee.

The Award for Resident Leadership recognizes a person who:

• Has shown incredible volunteerism and involvement in their community and/or community initiatives.

• Goes above and beyond typical resident action to sit on boards, head committees, and/or encourage the engagement of other residents.

• Works to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Sundy to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Sundy had to say.

Sundy Whiteside, resident of the Walnut Park East neighborhood, Board President of the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO), and Co-Chair of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative's Vacancy Advisory Committee (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

I was raised in North St. Louis City. I’ve seen it in much better times when people were more engaged and active in our neighborhood and critical elements that played a role in kids’ lives, like schools, were stronger. Schools were the place to go and the place to be. The old high school that’s now an elementary school around the corner from my house used to have after-school activities and put on plays. There were team sports and games. You can still see a basketball or football game at some, but things are different in terms of safety. I just don’t see our kids having enough of those types of recreational activities today to get to know each other. There used to be a time when children in the neighborhood would play outside and sit on the porch when the street lights came on. They didn’t have to worry about anything like someone being shot and killed or drug deals. Now it’s like a street mentality has taken over. Instead of fighting with their fists when they have an argument, now kids kill. Maybe the use of guns was glamorized playing things like cowboys and Indians, but weapons like that used to be feared. I see youth posing with them on social media now like there’s this sexy appeal to them and I’m astonished. Then again, when I hear about these kids being shot or killed, I guess I’m not exactly surprised.

I miss simple things, like counting on Sunday dinners. If there was an event and I had to wear a dress, I’d have one. My mother loved to buy me clothes. Everyone in the neighborhood, whether they were poor or had money, we all got new Christmas clothes and Easter outfits. Nowadays, some kids don’t even have what we’d call a going to church outfit. I hate how the family unit has been decimated in my community. Families had a strict ‘we care about you, so we’re not allowing you to do terrible things’ understanding. Now the senior members lost that sense of influence and authority to the point where families are almost afraid to say something when they know their own child is out in the streets doing bad things. Things have changed. The family structure is different. Priorities are different. A lot of it is due to drugs. Someone’s mother gets addicted to crack, her son ends up being the local drug dealer, and then his son takes over. It’s sad to see. There was a time when crack wasn’t in the lives of people around me. Everybody seemed to care more, seemed to be concerned more, seemed to value each other’s lives more than what we do today.

I come from one of those families everybody knew in the neighborhood — my grandmother, my mother, my aunts. Everyone called my grandmother, ‘Nana.’ She was nice but also had that strict side. She was known for maintaining her lawn. And if you were playing and stepped on it, she’d let you know: ‘Get off my grass!’ Every morning, she’d brew a pot of coffee, people would come over, and they’d sit on her front porch or in her kitchen to talk. The landscape’s so different now. It’s hard to trust anyone from the neighborhood streets and have them come in your house or have a cup of coffee in your kitchen.

What is it that makes you tireless about the work you do?

There are so many topics I’m into now — vacancies, cleanups, community development, benefit agreements. The work I do creates hope and that’s what keeps me doing it. When I host an event, especially neighborhood cleanups that go well, people are excited and there’s a lot of love. And, you know, we appreciate volunteers coming into the City and helping us clean up our neighborhoods. But when you see your own neighbors show up and clean up, and they’re working hard to keep our area clean, it’s even more inspiring. Like, “Okay, I do live in a place that’s worth something.” Looking around my neighborhood, there are dilapidated buildings, people are selling crack and speeding down the street, and it’s scary because you don’t know what’s getting ready to pop off. Living here, stuff like that can almost make you feel worthless. But then through these neighborhood cleanups that I help run, I see residents bonding from the planning process to the cleanups and it’s great. I go to many different neighborhoods in the City and I experience that over and over again. A lot of times I know the people, or I don’t know them at all and try to bring them together. And everything about the whole experience brings about camaraderie. It creates a synergy that breeds hope in our community.

SLACO is trying to build the capacity of neighborhood residents to unite, mobilize, and organize. People’s voices have been neglected for so long, some don’t even speak anymore. So we’re bringing more equity to the table to change that. Everything I’m doing from co-founding the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative and co-chairing the Vacancy Advisory Committee to securing the Proposition Neighborhood Stabilization fund is focused on inclusivity and it’s community-driven. That also gives people hope, and that’s what gives me the breathe to keep going.

North of Delmar, trash is a huge issue. Even though our brick buildings are beautiful, we live in an environment where the worth of the housing and the area is not valued. Insiders and outsiders will just dump their things here. People living here have complained so much and authorities started to crack down by enforcing fines. But there’s a point where not enough is being done and the dumping and bad things continue to happen. Then it almost makes you feel like there must be a reason for that and, ultimately, it comes back to it being a reflection of you. When the value of where you live is minimal or worthless, you start to adopt that way of thinking. Then you start seeing children and adults recognizing the trash around here and throwing their drink containers on some vacant lot too. Now we’ve collectively developed a sense of, ‘Where I live is not worth anything. And if everyone else around me thinks that way, it’s probably the truth.’

So neighborhood cleanups inspire new ways for people to bond and see other residents who want to roll up their sleeves and do something for where we live. The first neighborhood cleanup I put together with my residents was in 2016. We always take before and after pictures. I always try to have snacks or food because it’s fun to break bread together. What do you do with family, with people you love and those who have taken care of you all your life? You get together, catch up, eat, and bond. And when we end our cleanups, the ‘I didn’t know you’ from before has completely changed. Neighborhood residents share a greater sense of worth and value. They feel euphoric and loved, like, ‘Yeah, we did it!’

Who’s the youngest person that came to a neighborhood cleanup and touched your heart?

I know a 14-year-old who comes to the cleanups. He’ll ride his bike there and do a lot of stuff. I just met him at a Fairground Park cleanup we did through North Newstead. This child is a talker and he talked the whole time. He’s brilliant. And after we got done, he said, “I really like this. I didn’t know our neighborhood was as bad off as it is.” Doing these cleanups, you really get to see the ins and outs of your neighborhood and it’s one of those things you want to close your eyes to after a while. It’s disturbing and distressing. I said, “Yeah, and I think every resident should be required to canvass in their area too so they can see what it looks like.”

What he saw that first day he came out to help was intense. And now he comes to our cleanups and is working with us. He’s inspired and really wants to do community work, so that’s a good thing. That’s why I applied for a grant to pay youth to participate so they can have that same euphoria I feel when I work in the community and also feel worthy. If that can be cultivated at a young age, that feeling will stay with that child through adulthood and they’ll want to care for and volunteer in their community. We don’t have a lot of money to do things, but we have a lot of people who care and are working together.

I want to charge every resident, especially north of Delmar, to commit to two hours every month of some form of community involvement. Whether you go to your local ward meeting or a parent-teacher meeting, it’s a small request. We don’t have the luxury to not be engaged and in community. It’s urgent. We’re about to be transformed. In other people’s eyes, our area is about to be revitalized. And in my eyes, we’re about to be pushed out if we don’t get more engaged and connected. 

I don’t like the concept of ‘clean sweep.’ The terminology means to remove an unwanted person or object. It’s normally used in political elections, in the penal system, or in military terms. But it’s not what I want to hear used in neighborhoods, and that’s what’s getting ready to happen. If we don’t wake up and become active in what’s going on in some of our areas, we won’t be able to afford to live in them, and we will be pushed out.

My family and another family were one of the first Black families to move to Walnut Park. We had a lot of Caucasians living on the street and then they moved out. That led to a lot of the decline we see on the north side. Disinvestment and redlining tactics are being used to decrease our quality of life so we either move or have no voice, no money, no resources, nothing to stand on. My mother and grandmother used to say, “They’re blighting us out now. One day, they’re gonna show up here when it almost gets to rock bottom and take over.” And I want to say, “They are here.”

I watch the areas on the edge of Delmar, like Academy Sherman Park and the West End, doing their neighborhood planning to deal with the recent redevelopment there. And that’s what’s coming for the neighborhoods further north too. Gentrification is on the way. It’s an emergency situation and why every resident should start engaging with their community. Their lives depend on it. We can’t just allow it to weigh on our seniors and adults. We have to start nurturing our children to cultivate value in this too. That’s the critical piece that will help create and sustain thriving neighborhoods for the future.

The level of participation in the community is strong but it’s also on life support. And I love the word ‘community,’ but I also love the word ‘neighborhood.’ For a long time, in my neighborhood, I never knew a Walnut Park East and a Walnut Park West. We were just Walnut Park, united. And I think about how at some point, we dropped the word ‘neighbor.’ The atmosphere just becomes the ‘hood.’ What a contrast. A name is critical. It has such an impact. My name is Sundy, and something seeps in there to permeate in my cells that causes me to be kind of sunshine-y. Anyway, remember Sesame Street and how they sang, “Who are the people in your neighborhood?” Someone pointed out how SLACO talks about being an umbrella association for all the neighborhoods, but what is a neighborhood? Where some people grow up, they have no concept of it. Oh my goodness, it’s true! When I looked out my window to see the landscape, we had Mrs. Sneed across the street and Mrs. Ashley — we had neighborhood and that sense of community. We really knew who the people were in the neighborhood — the person who drove the bus, the person who delivered mail. Now so many residents don’t even want to get to know each other. It’s a different atmosphere. In my neighborhood, we do have a groundswell of community. We have those pockets of neighbors we all love and give a card to or vegetables from our gardens. Still, it used to be stronger.

One day I came outside my house and there were like 60 kids on the corner. The most recent thing they started doing when young people got shot and killed was a balloon release and then they shoot bullets up in the air. They’d shoot for like seven minutes and it would horrify us living in the area. So I talked to the local lady who’s more in tune with the younger folks and asked if she could set up something for people from my generation to dialogue with them, because I really want them to come to our SLACO conference. Teaching younger people is the critical piece. There’s this African proverb that says ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.’ I feel like that’s what is happening in our neighborhoods, in our community.

I walked outside, and was like, Mr. Sneed, “What’s going on down the street?” And he said, “I don’t know. I saw all of that. But let me tell you if it’s not your house, Ms. Troy’s house, or Mr. Anderson’s house, I don’t pay any attention. I’m not worried about anybody else but you all.” So we’ve reduced ourselves to select families who we’ve always known in the neighborhood and kind of keeping everyone else at arm’s distance.

I live in my grandmother’s house. The reason I stayed in St. Louis is that my mother fell ill. Mom loved to smoke and to eat whatever she wanted to — sugar, fried food. She didn’t exercise much, but she worked hard to have a better life for me and I did the same for my daughter. Mom had her first stroke when I was in college. I was like, “Lord, how can you allow this to happen to my mom?” It just got worse. A few years after I graduated, she started losing her memory and was in the early stages of dementia. I was her caretaker for nine years and it was hard. I was also working as an electrical engineer and I paid a nurse to come to my mother’s house to care for her.

Courtesy of Sundy Whiteside

My mom was originally a school teacher but ended up working for Anheuser Busch in the brewery as a bottler. She made a lot of money doing that and it put me through school at Missouri University of Science and Technology, formerly known as UMR, the University of Missouri-Rolla. Mom was diagnosed with diabetes in her 40s and you always think your parents — mothers, especially — who organize, plan, and orchestrate everything would be on top of things. Well, she was on insulin shots and wasn’t administering her shots like she should have. By the time she was 65, she had her first stroke which turned into multiple strokes. Veins delivering oxygen to her brain started to collapse and that caused her to have dementia.

She had wild episodes. I wish I could write a book on all of the episodes she had wandering down the street and around the corner. In her early stages, I didn’t even know what dementia was. When she started to not drive so well, I just thought maybe she was out of practice. She still looked so young, she was witty, and she’d go off on you but you’d be loving it. I remember I was working in St. Peters and she’d call me to take her somewhere. I was like, “But you have a car. You can drive. C’mon now!” She said, “No, I need you to come take me.” So I thought I’d give her a lesson again. I was so naive. My daughter, my mom, and I hopped in the car and I had Mom driving in a big parking lot. It was the most alarming thing and that’s when I realized she was not putting on.

She hadn’t started losing her memories, but eventually it got bad. She was incontinent and needed to be bathed daily. My mother lived five blocks from her 90-year-old mother, so we moved them in together. My grandmother couldn’t do anything to help though. One day I just cleaned my mother up and brought her with me to work. She sat there almost the whole day. I don’t think she enjoyed it, but it was like bringing my daughter to work when she got out of school early. She didn’t bother anybody. Thank goodness, no one said anything.

When I took her to the bathroom to clean her face, I warm the washcloth and give it to her and she’d start cleaning the counter. So she’d have these episodes and then be back to her normal self. When she got more ill, I needed to move her into a nursing home and within months she died. But while I spent time with her all those years, I always wanted to know, “Is my mother in there? Is she trapped? Is she feeling like she can’t articulate what’s happening?” I wanted to know, not from experience, but I’d like someone to share what having dementia is really like.

Courtesy of Sundy Whiteside

The mother-daughter relationship has been the most powerful relationship in my life, whether it’s my relationship with my mom or my relationship with my daughter. That relationship dynamic has been my most emotional and powerful human connection. I spent a few years in a depressed state after my mother passed and then my grandmother. Finally, when my daughter was just about finished with college, I got back to work and began with the Community Action Partnership movement at the Human Development Corporation as their network administrator and IT person. And my daughter is now a Doctor of Pharmacy — Dr. Whiteside — and she’s engaged to be married. I am so blessed and excited! When she was a year from graduating, I felt like there was a light at the end of the tunnel and this single parent Mom was ready to do more things in the community. I’d go to meetings, become engaged, and pay attention to what was happening. I started doing neighborhood cleanups, tutoring math and science to students, and working with the Walnut Park East Neighborhood Association. From there, SLACO and vacancy. Now my position is all-volunteer, and I love what I do.

- Sundy Whiteside, resident of the Walnut Park East neighborhood, Board President of the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO), and Co-Chair of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative's Vacancy Advisory Committee

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Sundy at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building

Congratulations to Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, recipient of our 2021 Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building!

The Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building recognizes a person who:

• Has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to community building work.

• Has exhibited leadership, vision, and a commitment to action and results.

• Has catalyzed outstanding impact in community building policy, investment, and/or community change.

• Has worked to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Barbara to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Barbara had to say.

Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?

Mom and Dad courtesy of Barbara Levin

When I was in second grade, I was president of the Busy Bee Club, so I knew I was going to be in charge. I always had to be in charge. I was the president of my youth group too. Then in college, I thought I would be a teacher. At one point, I was an English major. I was of the generation where teaching or nursing was what I was told to do. Social work wasn’t in our framework. My mother came to this country when she was 19. Neither my mother nor my father got beyond eighth grade, but education was really important in my family. So going to college was a big deal. My sister went to art school and worked hard to pay for that. I went to a state school because it was cheap. 

The year after I graduated with a BSW, my school implemented a one-year MSW combination. I was part of the first class to come back and get an MSW with advanced standing. I wanted to go to law school at that point, but I was also tired of school: “Three years of law school versus one year to get an MSW? Ah, I’ll do the MSW.” Of course, I went the clinical route because that’s what everybody did. And I never used it because I immediately got hired by a Jewish youth group to do program development, leadership training, and nonprofit advising. In the beginning, I did some therapy as volunteer work. But I always felt like I need to fix things. I can’t sit for an hour nodding my head and keeping my mouth shut going “um-hum.” Still, I use clinical work every day and I tell that to my students all the time.

Courtesy of Barbara Levin

Teaching is hard and it gets harder and harder. While I’m a co-teaching professor, 80% of my job is still field education, which is a lot of coaching and mentoring and developing more field units. One of the most fun things I do when I go to a meeting is sit in the back and count all the Brown School grads in the room talking, sticking with the work they’re doing in St. Louis, making a difference. And I just feel so proud. My husband, Barry, and I only had one child. So it feels like I have a lot of other children. And sometimes I treat them that way. Whenever we’re asked to go for a drink with somebody, they’re either getting married, getting pregnant, or looking for a new job and want to share with us. It’s one of the joys of being in St. Louis. It’s sad when people leave, but the more we can keep them and get them jobs, it’s important for the region. That is my life's work. And if people who come here are going to work in St. Louis, I want them to have a perspective that’s different from just a planning perspective. Social work brings to the table a set of values that are the essence of community development and, for me, it’s all about group work.

When I think about who taught me about community building and the work I’ve been doing for the past 46 years, it’s been a journey. At 13, I joined a Jewish youth group in Baltimore. We were all kids from the city and we weren’t members of anything. Our parents couldn’t afford to join a temple or even the Jewish Community Center. So we all met at each others’ homes and it was very homegrown. That’s how my husband and I met because he grew up in the same youth group movement. He got a scholarship to go to graduate school and I didn’t. But when I finished graduate school, my youth group leader called and asked, “Do you want to move to Boston and work for us?” I was in Boston, Barry was in New York, and we met at a staff meeting.

In those days, every staff person was a social worker. Nonprofits were the same way. Social workers ran everything until we agreed with boards that MBAs did better and we gave organizations up to them. Urban planning grew out of social work too. And what’s nice about community development is it’s not a profession. You don’t get a degree in it. Community development is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It’s a mishmash. You may be a lawyer who understands the legal aspects of zoning and codes, but maybe you don’t know how to talk to people. So it’s important to have social workers at the table. And at the youth group I worked for, every one of our leaders was a social worker. They’d bring in professors from the school of social work who taught us group dynamics at a weekend hotel event. I had to break into groups and facilitate. They set the framework, the values, the way we practiced. And that, to me, was community building.

When I think of social capital, it isn’t about my relationship with people, it’s about the networks and connections people have with each other in a neighborhood. It takes a very long time to build those because it’s about building trust.

If you don’t go to a meeting for six months, I’ve seen that people can forget you. If you move away and come back, it’s hard to get re-established too — which, you can — but, the networks change easily. I don’t want to go to another meeting. I’m as bad as everyone else! I don’t even volunteer in my own neighborhood. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be engaged or bring value. We have to get around the idea that leaders are the ones who show up. They often show up in places designed for the traditional leader — like, someone with time and resources who can attend a monthly meeting. I worried about that with COVID. It was sad that a lot of students didn’t want to enroll in my community development practice class during the pandemic, so we didn’t have the two semesters we usually do in the school year. Students were saying they couldn’t do community development on Zoom, yet the neighborhoods were doing just that. If students can learn how to stay connected and engaged over the computer, in-person’s a no-brainer.

It’s easy to break down social capital connections because they’re tenuous, transient, and, especially at a neighborhood level, people are moving in and out all the time. When do we call elders on the block ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’ anymore? There’s a couple on our block with two kids and they asked, “What are you comfortable with them calling all of you? We don’t want them to call you by your first names.” So I’m either Aunt Barbara or Miss Barbara. It’s that old Southern thing. I still call Miss Shirley, Miss Shirley. And we just lost Miss Dolores from O’Fallon. Connections are falling apart and it has nothing to do with the economics of a neighborhood.

Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis pictured with Constance Siu, Community Engagement Specialist at North Newstead Association (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

I’ve noticed there’s a shift in that social work students want to do policy. And policy doesn’t necessarily involve relationships. The same people who want to do policy, when we sit down at a cafe with community neighbors, they can’t even speak. You see they’re uncomfortable walking the street and waving at somebody. They’re not even used to doing that in the neighborhoods where they live. I can immediately tell who’s comfortable and who smiles at people versus those who can’t handle being around people. That’s not a Karl or Jillian Guenther; that’s not a Jessica Eiland; that’s not a Timetria Murphy-Watson, Vontriece McDowell, or Constance Siu. It’s kind of like leadership. I understand leaders are not born. However, after eight years of working with teenagers in a youth leadership program, I can look out into a group of kids and pick out who’s going to be the leader. There’s something about their energy, openness, and aura.

The thing I’m most proud of and what got me into the community was being asked to co-teach a community development course the first time with Lou Columbo. He was the urban planner, I was the social worker, and we had to come together on this. We spent six months building relationships in the neighborhood we chose to focus on and we could then model that for students. Now I’ve been teaching that class for many years with Debra Moore and I’ve learned it doesn’t work if a neighborhood is used as a project and a relationship is not built to have something ongoing. It’s a struggle every semester to do that.

My commitment is at the neighborhood level and with the students. So how do we keep it fresh? We’ve consistently been doing semesters in Hyde Park and they then don’t see WashU as being used for research. They knew we would be part of a long-term commitment. That’s very important, just like the message that we give to students. Students are learning things the community already has. Of course, students will learn what Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is. I want students to fundamentally learn how to build relationships. And neighborhoods don’t want a newbie student asking them or testing out their interviewing skills on them. When it’s a one-time thing, the neighborhood is just a paper — the client who a report is written about. But long-term, the deliverables and educational outcomes are different.

Some speak of neighborhoods as a laboratory, and I don’t see them as that. I see them as our partners. The practice of teaching is you listen first to the community, you respond to them, and they have all the answers and assets. Our role is to support that and maybe add to it by giving information about best practices and helping the community decide how to make movements forward and prioritize. Sometimes when we’re teaching students, they’ll wonder what their role is, like, “I know more.” “No, you don’t. You know how to do some stuff. The community knows what it needs.” And if we can also bring some assets around Washington University in St. Louis’ presence and the Brown School’s presence, then that’s valuable too.

I have to continuously check myself because my go-to is to fix things. My daughter will tell you that in a minute. I’ll listen, I’ll ask questions, and then I’ll be like, “Okay, this is what I think you should do…” It’s really hard to just listen. And it’s really hard to listen to something someone’s gonna do that I don’t think is gonna do them well. Even with students, I focus on building that long-term relationship so I can ask them, “Have you thought about trying this or that?” My goal is not just to teach them but to get them on a career path. I love when they can get a job in St. Louis and stay. I wish there were more opportunities though.

Do you find it interesting and challenging or is it creative?

Initially, I was hired at the Brown School to be the program coordinator of an endowed program. The vision was to provide technical assistance for small nonprofits that couldn’t afford consultants and felt that the school had a responsibility to provide that for social service agencies. Alliance for Building Capacity, ABC, was its name and it changed a number of times until it broadened to capacity building through community development and practicum. Whether it’s technical assistance or capacity building, how it’s done for a nonprofit is similar to how it’s done for community development. 

So I don’t go into projects and meetings telling you what you need to do. I’m not the consultant who says, “Everyone needs a strategic plan, you gotta do it my way, and this is what you do,” which is sometimes how planners and designers come in. Instead, it’s, “What do you need? What’s your priority? How can I help you build what you want to build?” It’s coming in where people are at, getting the lay of the land from their perspective, and figuring out what I can add to their goals to better their community.

I know my work has to be creative or at least perceived to be unique. And the challenge in the relationship is listening and offering and thinking about what could work. I have no one way of doing things except to listen and to respond. I also know what doesn’t work. I was asked to help with a CDC in a neighborhood group I didn’t spend a lot of time with. I knew people on the board and I approached the invitation to capacity build for the organization. But what they weren’t doing was really listening to the community. So they needed to do their own work. I had to tell them, “We may be ready to do what you want to do, but who is here at the table?” How do you build readiness? Nonprofits aren’t always ready. Communities are often not ready.

Who’s really not heard when it comes to voice and community engagement?

What I’ve been thinking about lately is this whole idea of voice and community engagement. I read an article about how it’s a false narrative because there’s always going to be somebody left out. You may have a majority, like the people who attend to vote on something or do community participatory budgeting, but somebody’s voice is not going to get heard. There’s history around developers who want to come into a community and get some work done and they get a voice. And when they don’t like what they hear or get what they want, they don’t just leave. They’ll keep going around an issue looking to convince people until they decide to pull the funding or find another area they can invest in. Some of this also systematically relates to how communities are funded and how we make decisions. There’s so much need and so much money and so many hands in the pot that investment funds rarely get to the community. The work is a result of historic and ongoing systemic racism at every level and in every aspect — housing, education, economic development, transportation, infrastructure — related to policy and funding access. At the end of the day, we may not be redlining, but we’re doing it anyway. We still have covenants. And we still have to deal with the aftermath because it impacts another couple of hundred years.

What’s a ripple effect you’re particularly proud of that you’ve left in St. Louis?

The reputation of the graduate students who are working in St. Louis. We, more than when I started, recognize the Brown School has something to offer. Our community development work and social work are valuable. And practicum is an innovative way of impacting a community without having to do work in the classroom. I’ll give you an example from the first semester I taught in Hyde Park.

One of our students had a practicum with a community group that was formed and the group wanted to do a Halloween event. So they came up with the idea of calling it Spooktacular and the student convened a group of kids and parents to see what Halloween would look like in the neighborhood. They had never done that before. There were two other groups involved and they were gonna get some money and do a trunk-or-treat that the kids said they wanted at the nearby school.

So we figured out a way to map out a route. One of the locals in Hyde Park has a balloon business, so we bought balloons from her and ballooned the route. Then my students went door to door to ask if residents would be home and if they needed candy we would get them candy. Then we met at the corner of Salisbury and N. 23rd St., planned out for students to take about 10 kids to start the route, another 10 would register, and students would take off to do the route with them too. Then they’d get to the end at Clay Elementary School where there’d be the trunk-or-treat and other organizations would celebrate Spooktacular too.

A half an hour in, like 200 kids and their parents came out of the woodwork. And our students had to teach the kids how to knock on doors. Children would bang on them because they’d never just knocked on someone’s door and said “trick-or-treat!” The parents said, “Oh my god, we never thought we’d do this in Hyde Park.” They used to get in the car and head to the Central West End or Ladue because they didn’t want to do trick-or-treat in their neighborhood for lots of different reasons.

We ended the evening, but it’s continued in that neighborhood in different ways and each time it’s changed depending on what the neighborhood wanted. About the fourth time, the neighborhood decided to have the event at the park in Hyde Park. They got funding and had a stage and dancing and made a horror maze out of wood and it was all very do-it-yourself. They celebrated on a Wednesday night. It was dark. And there were 300 to 400 people there.

A woman whose organization participated was standing with me and Debra Moore and said, “Isn’t this great?” We said, “You did a great job.” And, to us, that was success because the people from the neighborhood knew and felt like they did it. The neighborhood felt like they owned it and they did.

Not only in academia but in the world, if you don’t write about it and document it, it’s as if it didn’t happen. Debra Moore and I talk about how we should have written up the Halloween in Hyde Park story or the work we’ve done in O’Fallon as some sort of paper. Even some of the early work I did with Alliance for Building Capacity, which has since become East Side Aligned. If you don’t write down the stories, they disappear.

What would make a tremendous difference in the work you’d like to do moving forward?

The academic in me would love to be able to point to population-level change. Is the average income in Hyde Park higher with people moving in and out or has it stabilized? Are the residents staying and feeling like they’re part of the neighborhood? How do you measure engagement? Maybe through voting, maybe people want to buy a house if they could, maybe they want to rent to own and it becomes their place? Are people seeing the area as a place they want to be a part of?

I would love to say we can document some of that and I don’t know that we can. That’s way long-term. And I don’t know how to tackle the crime stats. A couple of years ago, there was a little boy shot in Hyde Park right in the street where there’s new housing. There’s a lot of development that has been done. Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church is right there. And with the randomness of shootings and crime, unless we can tackle that, I don’t know how any of this development is really going to move along.

I’m excited to come back for school in person in the Fall and to figure out what’s happening in the neighborhood, what it needs, and how we can support. I haven’t had enough opportunities to really sit with people and hear. And there’s going to be that whole process of meeting with people and opening up again.

Courtesy of Barbara Levin

Why have you decided to put your time and energy into St. Louis and stay?

Honestly, I was a trailing spouse, yelling and screaming in 1993. We came because of my husband’s job. And I said, “Okay, let’s try five years,” and now it’s almost 30 years later. I started working at the Brown School in 2002. It gave me a whole other set of energy. The university can be a great hindrance, but it’s also a gift to work there. Why am I staying now? It’s an easy place to be. We’re city folk. We love cities. And the cities we love the most, we can’t afford to live in. If I could live in Manhattan, I would. Well, after COVID and Zoom, I don’t know. But, life changes.

Courtesy of Barbara Levin

Eventually, I know I’ll want to be closer to my grandbabies. They have changed everything. We just did an interview with the organization that supports work for children with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy, the syndrome one of our granddaughters has. We have a voice to advocate for families without resources. I don’t know how they manage without healthcare coverage, so our heart is there with them. Every child should have access to the kinds of support she has access to. So if we can use our voices in that way, that would be my next thing too. I see the world differently now. I see the world alongside someone with limited physical capacity. It’s a disability in the sense that the structures keep her from being able to be fully in the world.

What’s something about community building today that you didn’t know?

There are textbooks full of stuff I don’t know. But it has reinforced the idea that a top-down approach doesn’t always work. And a bottom-up approach doesn’t always work because if you don’t have the political clout to have that voice, it may not work. How do you find that middle ground? Community building is still evolving and that keeps me excited. The model is still very much about power and money. Where are they and who’s got them?

I read a report from St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) and the first part was a history of all the plans that have been made around St. Louis. I’d be interested to see how much of that money was spent for very little outcomes, except for the ones where plans said to build Highway 64/40 through Mill Creek and North City. That worked. That they were able to do. And that’s the whole history of racism and continued racism in this city. I don’t mind calling it out either. 

But how many redevelopment plans actually worked? How do they define community engagement? How did they follow through? And how much money was paid for consultants? I know that last one is cynical and consultants are needed. But so little money gets to people. What would happen if we gave everybody a liveable wage? We could do it. It’s less about money than it is about decisions and leadership. There is money. It’s just not spent how it could be. Webster Groves and East St. Louis have similar city budgets. Who would have known?

Way way back, I was on the decision committee for the annual Community Builders Network awards. I feel like I haven’t been in community development as long or contributed as much as others who might be more deserving. I’m always thinking what I’m doing is not as impactful, so I was really humbled and taken aback by this idea of getting the lifetime achievement award this year.

I remember the day Karl Guenther had a video conference call with folks in Philadelphia about how they have a community development corporation (CDC) umbrella organization. And he walked out of my office, stood in the hallway, and said, “We have to do this in St. Louis!” I told him, “Let’s make it work.” They did it at UMSL because Todd Swanstrom had his Des Lee endowment money to do it. But my history with CBN goes back to the beginning and I believe in what it does and what it has done and how it’s brought us together.

Invest STL came from this idea of developing a local funding resource specifically for community development. So how do we raise money together that will eventually build into a pot we could share with CDCs because funding for them is so minimal? And it started with Karl Guenther and Jessica Eiland and a few other people hanging out at bars one night a week and us putting in $10. Hank Webber and I would attend and we felt like the grandparents of the group. I’d put my money in, have a little drink, and then leave when it got late and I had to go to bed. Since then, it’s morphed into the region’s community economic development support system for growing great neighborhoods in STL.

- Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Barbara at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism

Congratulations to WEPOWER, recipient of our 2021 Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism!

The Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:

• Demonstrates a deep and honest commitment to transforming work being done in the St. Louis region so that it is more equitable, just, and antiracist.

• “Walks the talk”—goes beyond verbal commitments to ask hard questions, embrace and push through discomfort, work to rectify inequities where they exist, and take action.

• Actively works to dismantle systems of oppression.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Charli Cooksey, WEPOWER’s Founder and CEO, to learn more about her and the work her team does. Here’s some of what Charli had to say.

Charli Cooksey, Founder and CEO of WEPOWER (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

The most grounding moments I have are when I am in relationship with and proximate and deeply listening to Black women — Black mothers and Black childhood providers, in particular. They keep me grounded in who I’m accountable to, why I’m doing this work, why it’s urgent, and where to focus. From 2018 to 2020, a group of organizations had been working really hard to gear up for a ballot measure in St. Louis County to win up to $84 million per year for early childhood education. That would have been the first time in the history of St. Louis that there would be local dedicated public funding for early childhood and it would have been a significant amount that was going to be guaranteed for ECE centers and public schools with pre-k programs with the majority of dollars focused on North St. Louis County.

It’s interesting because all of our systems were failing Black families before the pandemic and the pandemic exacerbated things that we knew were already unacceptable. So it was something that was desperately needed and we were working super hard. We had our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed and had this beautiful campaign launch for Ready By Five. We got together in the school gym of a UCity elementary school with hundreds of folks and kicked it off with a signature-gathering initiative because we needed to get a little over 40,000 signatures to be placed on the ballot by November 2020.

We had a plan. We were hitting the ground. And there was so much energy in the space. We even turned off the lights and turned on our phone lights, waving them in the air, declaring our commitment to children and to winning the ballot measure. Then we transitioned to a training of organizing where we had tons of folks there committed to learning how to build power to win money for our babies, birth to five years old. The next week, our team and partners gathered signatures all day from people while standing in the rain. We were just building so much momentum. We had collected our first 1,000 signatures almost immediately after the campaign launched. Then the pandemic hit.

The pandemic really stopped us in our tracks because, in order to get on the ballot, we had to be super grassroots. We needed to knock on doors, we needed to be standing outside of grocery stores, we needed to go to churches and early childhood education centers to talk to anyone we could to get their support to get us on the ballot to win that $84 million. What a gut punch to the stomach to be so close to something we’d been working on for so long and to see so much hope and energy from a group of providers and parents who felt neglected by our region for so long.

When that happened we were like, “This is over. We’ll have to figure out another year and time to do this again. There’s no way we can do it amidst the pandemic and not seeing an end in sight.” But we also said, “We need to have conversations. We need to ask our base — mothers, educators, and Black women — ‘What should we do? How do we stay accountable to you all and follow your lead?’” And that’s when they said, “We need this money! This isn’t over. Come up with Plan B.” And we did.

The humbling piece of all of this was the tension of everyday Black folks being failed by the ECE system being at odds with local leaders; equity leaders; and civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. And it’s hard because there are leaders who have large platforms and voices and opinions, and folks who don’t have those can shout something at the top of their lungs and no one hears it. But because the person with the larger platform can get a meeting with a county executive or mayor or can tweet something that gets a few likes, their voice tends to get amplified more than those being failed by our system.

That moment reminded me that we are accountable to everyday Black folks making minimum wage, working hard to educate our babies, working so hard that they can’t give their own children the education they need because it costs too much to go to a center and there aren’t enough centers for them. So asking myself, “What is it that I need to do?” reminded me this is my calling and to stay focused.

We went back to the drawing board and Plan B was to get the county council to get us on the ballot. We had seven council members and needed four to vote in support of the ballot measure. At the top of the day when it was time to vote in April 2020, we had four votes but then found out the ballot language had changed. Our original intent was that the $84 million was 100% for early childhood education and would get equitably allocated to centers and public schools with those most marginalized and directly impacted by systemic racism. And somehow that was not what was to be presented to be voted on.

It was a hard year. And we finally had to say, “It’s not worth pursuing this ballot measure if it doesn’t preserve the integrity of our intentions. If it’s not going to be guaranteed for the early childhood system, then this isn’t for us.” It wasn’t meant to happen, but we still had work to do. A few months later, a measure to secure public funding for early childhood ended up on a ballot in St. Louis City for $2.4 million per year and we pivoted quickly to gear up for that. To go from no public funding to some public funding was still a huge feat in itself.

There’s over a billion-dollar gap for funding in early childhood per year, which is unacceptable. That means there are about 50,000 children every year who don’t get to go to early childhood education programs because there aren’t enough seats. And of the ones who do go, only about 19% of them are subsidized, which means the system really is designed for middle-class to affluent families who can pay their way into a quality center. And what else is pretty alarming is that only about 5% of centers across the city and country are accredited, which is another indicator of quality. So out of 90,000 children, only about 5% have access to a quality early childhood center.

There’s so much data that shows birth to five is the most transformative time of a human’s life. What we do and how we treat our babies is going to leave ripples effects that impact their life trajectory. And what impacts our children impacts not just them but our entire region. This is why a lack of investment in early childhood education is a lack of investment in us being able to create a region that is truly thriving.

There were all these rumors and people conspiracy theorizing around what the campaign was and what WEPOWER was and wasn’t and these accusations that we were against the teachers union and teachers’ rights. Yet, we were doing all this work because we deeply believe in the power of educators and the impact they have on the lives of children. Educators have the most important job there is. And we believe they should have all the rights and benefits in the world. So we had to navigate the noise in spaces that proclaim equity but don’t practice equity.

It was discouraging, but every time we knocked on a door to talk to a voter, we were reminded that this was our base. We were reminded that everyday people all across the city want to see change and want to see an investment in early childhood education. So whenever we felt down we were like, “Let’s go knock on some doors. We are accountable to Black families and communities who have been ignored for generations in this region.” And talking to them reminded us, “You know why you’re here. Don’t get distracted by the noise.” And in the end, we won the city ballot measure in November 2020 after running a very brief and ambitious campaign.

Vanessa was a member of WEPOWER’s Early Childhood Tomorrow Builders Fellowship when 14 fellows came together to work collaboratively with a lot of other organizations and community members to reimagine how early childhood education really functions. And that was part of the catalyst for pursuing the ballot measure because one of the solutions they came up with after hearing from tons of people was that more public funding was needed. So she went from being a fellow to us meeting one day over lunch to just talk about life. And the next thing I knew, she went from being a community leader to a member of the WEPOWER team and leading our economic justice work. Now, after leading early childhood work as a mother and community leader, she ran and has become the first Latina school board member in the history of the Ritenour School District.

It’s been beautiful to see her go from ‘this system needs to change’ to ‘I’m changing the system and it’s going to change because of me wielding my power unapologetically and doing so in my community through a formal seat at the table.’ That’s all great stuff, but the spirit of how she leads is what energizes me. She leads with compassion, with reflection, and with a continuous commitment to learning and growing vulnerably. Every day there’s a new insight she has about the world and how it impacts her and her children. The humanity she brings to her leadership and conversations around shifting systems is just so inspiring. It reminds me that this is the work — creating spaces for folks to recognize their brilliance and activate it in relation to others toward power building for our children.

There’s a lot that happens throughout a WEPOWER cohort. We do a half-day tour through St. Louis City and County to understand the historical context that has impacted the current state of education. And that’s an overwhelming experience to see how many ways policies and racism have divided our region and ultimately harmed our children. We do a session with NCCJ to explore our own identities and how oppression impacts the way we show up and engage with each other along with ways to uncondition that oppression and shift towards a culture of liberation.

What tends to be really pivotal for folks is our data walk where we just blast data on all the walls of a room about the current system. Unfortunately, when you disaggregate the data by race and class, it never evokes happiness and joy. It’s gut-wrenching to see the numbers and disparities. And in most cases, not only are things not changing, they’re getting worse. The more we become a country where the majority are people of color, the more disparity we’re seeing. When we look at everything and step back to realize this is our truth, that shifts folks from curiosity to rage and from rage to action.

I believe in this adrienne maree brown concept and Emergent Strategy principle: trust the people and the people will become trustworthy. We are the solution. We are the answers. Oftentimes, we overcomplicate things. We theorize and try to make sense of complicated visuals and graphics. And if we do this to get there to then get there to get to an outcome to… But the thing is pretty simple. Create a space for folks who are being failed by a system to wrestle with what the best solutions are for themselves, their families, and their communities. And, for me, it’s a testament to all we gotta do is listen and move out the way for folks to lead the change. So I hope to create enough proof points for this to become the new norm and not just be a WEPOWER thing but it becomes as common as the air we breathe. We’re creating the conditions for democracy to become normalized — not something that’s cool or an experiment, but the way we see and solve problems. And we do it in a way in St. Louis that works for us all.

Can you share about the relationships formed from the people of WEPOWER coming together?

The first WEPOWER cohort has been amazing to see because those women have become inseparable. I was just talking with four of our original power builders. They were the first community leaders with WEPOWER who kicked off a campaign advocating for Saint Louis Public Schools to increase budget transparency and equity in 2018. Most of them did not know each other. They just came because we called and said, “Please come to this program.” Now, a few years later, they’re best friends. They’re sisters. They see each other, work with each other, talk with each other. They pray for each other. And at the end of the day, they support each other. It’s magical the way they’ve built a community amongst themselves. Recently, they were canvassing in North St. Louis to get feedback from residents on the vision for what it looks like to build wealth in neighborhoods. And they were recruiting people to join the next round of our Power-Building Academy.

On a Saturday night, Miss Linda called me and said, “Now I’m calling you to preach to you. I don’t want to sound like your mom, but I’m doing this because I love you.” And she gave me all these pieces of advice about what we need to do at WEPOWER. I told her, “You know what? You’re right. That’s all great stuff.” And really the name is perfect because it’s the power of we. It’s not like I’m just in this room making decisions, but it’s the collective. It’s all of us bringing our experiences and wisdom together to say, “How do we make the sum greater than the individual parts?” Now I’m thinking every day about how we can start to act on those things Miss Linda told me that night. And when she came in on Monday to get some more material for canvassing, she asked, “You remember my name, right?” I looked at her and giggled in disbelief at her question. “Yes, Miss Linda.” She was like, “No. Mama!” She’s a jokester. So I’ve been calling her that. And it speaks to the community we’re building that’s rooted in joy and fun but also a commitment to each other and our future.

The Power-Building Academy is about electoral and issue-based organizing. Tomorrow Builders is about reimagining the system. Chisholm's Chair gets Black and Latinx women ready for public office. Those three programs are made up of almost 300 community members. And then we’ll launch our next round of leadership programming soon too.

There’s an organization in Arizona called LUCHA - Living United for Change in Arizona that pretty much led the effort to flip Arizona blue. All the things we saw that felt like they came out of nowhere in Arizona during the 2020 Presidential election were in part due to their leadership through years of grassroots power-building, community building, and base building. So they’re the dream. LUCHA’s led by these two dope Latino and Latina leaders who are co-executive directors. We’ve met with them and with other folks who have worked with them. And every time we learn more about them, it’s like that’s what we’re trying to build here in St. Louis — a powerful community made of thousands of folks fighting for their own liberation, winning, and doing it so unapologetically.

I remember them telling a story of how they kicked off a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage in Arizona and everyone told them, “You’re crazy. Don’t do it. We’re not giving you any money to do it.” And they were like, “We don’t care if you tell us not to do it and we don’t care if you’re not gonna give us money. We’re going to win regardless.” So without any support from traditional progressives, they ran that ballot measure and they won. Their story and evolution are a reminder for me to keep going, remember who your base is, stay focused on staying accountable to them, and to do unflinching things that need to happen.

Your CBN award is for growing in equity and antiracism, and this work has been pumping through your veins for a while now. What does it mean to you to receive this award?

The work continues. I live in North St. Louis and I’ve lived here my whole life. It’s exciting to celebrate receiving an award that acknowledges a commitment to equity, so I’m grateful for that. But it’s hard to celebrate an award about equity when the outcomes haven’t shifted yet. Every day I wake up, I’m reminded that we have so much work to do. And a lot of activities don’t mean outcomes are shifting. Every day I’m questioning, “How do I do the best I can to at least feel like we’re on track to shift outcomes?” What Forward Through Ferguson’s done is a great job of reminding the region that racial equity’s not a feeling, it’s an outcome. So folks are recognizing we can do this differently and achieve success in the process. And I still go to sleep at night wondering, “How close are we to moving beyond discussion and activity to people’s lives measurably changing?”

If you could take some of the hurts and pains away, what would they be?

Status quo. St. Louis has a way of being conditioned to fiercely and proudly protect stability over progress. And we can be risk-averse at times and it shows up in many ways that divide us. Folks who I would have hoped we could be in community with and that WEPOWER could have been collaborative with have actually been our biggest critics. There’s nothing wrong with critique, but I do find it discouraging that we get stuck there instead of finding enough common ground to move forward. There’s just too much at stake here. There are too many folks being killed every day, too many folks being failed by the education system, too many folks living in poverty beyond comprehension for us to get bogged down in politics. I wish we could remove ego. I wish we could have uncomfortable conversations and be okay with disagreeing but still discuss, “What’s the one thing we can commit to together so we can move something forward for the sake of our children and our future?”

What are the North stars that WEPOWER holds on tight to for how people can think about growing in equity and antiracism work?

Vulnerability, truth-telling, and data. Vulnerability is being okay with saying, “We messed up. We don’t have the answers.” Or, “I don’t know. Can you help us figure this out?” Vulnerability looks like this is what didn’t work this time, so this is what we’re going to do next time. Vulnerability with sharing how we’re feeling in a moment, being in a space where we can process our emotions, where people can cry but laugh at the same time. That culture of vulnerability has really allowed us to navigate everything internally as a team but also with our community members. 

For truth-telling and data, it’s hard to refute the data even though people try. The data is so alarming but also so honest. We use it to hold ourselves accountable. We are committed to shifting these outcomes because Black and Brown communities deserve not just to have people saying the right things, but for their quality of life to change. We do have a unique way of holding up data and saying, “This is the current state of things and we’re going to be pursuing solutions that will shift these data points.” We don’t just look at the data, but we say when something is unacceptable. We’ve done that in the early childhood and K-12 educational spaces. We get push back, but we don’t stop. We leverage data to continuously create a sense of urgency so more folks understand that Black and Brown folks deserve better than these data points.

When’s a time you had to be vulnerable in the work you do?

It’s not that I had to be, but that there are moments when I couldn’t help myself. My vulnerability usually isn’t calculated. I’m at the tipping point, at the edge. And you’re seeing me as I am.

What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?

A ballerina or a civil rights attorney. Although I do wonder what it would be like to live in New York and travel the world dancing, I think it makes perfect sense to be where I am right now.  Since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to my community. And my community’s here — it’s Fairground Park and O’Fallon Park. So I’m just grateful that I get the privilege to be here and pursue my dreams and see them come to life with my neighbors. I think it’s exactly where I need to be. It’s so, so, so hard, even traumatizing, and there are definitely days when it feels like, “You need to go somewhere else, Charli.” But I’m not giving up.

- Charli Cooksey, Founder and CEO of WEPOWER

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like the WEPOWER team at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building

Congratulations to the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, recipient of our 2021 Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building!

The Award for Collaboration and Coalition Building recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:

• Demonstrates incredible commitment to working through partnerships, even when it’s more challenging than “going it alone.”

• Forges new connections that bridge gaps between people, organizations, and places that don’t normally interact with each other in the St. Louis region.

• Shows up for others and participates directly in their work; does not only ask or expect that partners and collaborators come to them.

• Approaches difficulty and conflict with understanding, compassion, and an open mind.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative, to learn more about him and his team’s work. Here’s some of what Peter had to say.

Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

When I went to law school, I knew I wanted to do public interest work but I didn’t know what it meant. Anytime you’re in school, it’s an opportunity to try new things. Well, my first year I had an internship with a public defender in Kansas City where I got to work on pretty heavy stuff like murder trials. One of the defendants we represented was a young man about my age. I’d visit the client for hours on end, I got to know them, and we had a lot in common. There I was in school, being able to move up the ladder or whatever, but he grew up in a very different neighborhood than I did and didn’t have access to all the opportunities I had. I got emotionally invested trying to defend that client and do right by them. 

It wasn’t an ideal outcome. He’s probably still in prison and here I am now getting to do work that I love. I wonder how much of that is because of where we each grew up, how our environments shaped us, and what we had access to or didn’t. And as soon as that case was closed, the very next client who came in was also someone not that different in age and who grew up in a neighborhood without much access to opportunities. As important as that internship was, I wondered if there was a way to use my legal education or a career in public interest to help work with communities to create more opportunity.

My second year of law school, I interned with Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Economic Development Unit in Kansas City. Eventually, I told them, “I’m not going away. I love the work so much. You’re gonna have to pay me.” Things worked out when somebody left the team, a spot opened up, and I applied. I was fortunate to find that program in Kansas City because they used Missouri law. They represented neighborhoods in court and used legal tools to reclaim vacant properties. And I remember one of the first weeks of my internship reading over some laws and thinking, “This all applies to St. Louis too. At some point, I’m gonna get back there and work with neighborhoods to help get vacant houses fixed up.” I took that legal support for neighborhoods model that we had done to create opportunities for neighborhoods through legal assistance and returned to St. Louis eight years later to do the same work here.

Our team represents community groups, so our clients are usually neighborhood associations or community development corporations. We provide a variety of services, but a big focus is on representing them in court to use state laws that allow neighborhoods to acquire vacant and abandoned property. A lot of the litigation we do on behalf of neighborhood associations is aimed at absentee landowners or property owners. They may only exist on paper, so it’s hard for the City to hold those owners accountable in court. And when there’s an LLC or large entity, or the owner is dead, municipal code enforcement has its limitations. That’s when we identify properties that fit certain criteria, file a lawsuit in court, get legal access to the houses, clear off some of the liens, and find somebody in the neighborhood who wants to rehab or buy the homes.

Legal Services of Eastern Missouri’s Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative team (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

We started the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative in 2018 with support from the City through the St. Louis Development Corporation and The Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. As you can imagine, some of the cases and work are very labor-intensive. We can’t do it all ourselves. So there’s me, Latasha, and Rachel as the three attorneys; Melissa and Brittany as the paralegals; and we have a ton of pro-bono volunteers. We’ve partnered large law firms with neighborhood associations so they can bring more cases and handle more matters. And with all the expertise big firms have with sometimes hundreds of lawyers, they help serve residents of low- and middle-income neighborhoods here. So we do corporate governance work, problem property litigation, and real estate related services for residents, including free beneficiary deeds for homeowners.

One of the big reasons for vacancies is property abandonment. People will die without any estate plan, there’s not a lawyer in the community, or they don’t have the resources to make a will or draft and record a beneficiary deed or have a plan for their assets when they go. As a result, the default rule in Missouri is that when you die, if you don’t say what you want to happen, the title is split among all your heirs. So if any of those heirs want to get a bank loan, sell the place, or start fixing it up themselves, then they’ve got to go to a lawyer, they’ve got to go through probate, and it can take years and cost thousands of dollars. A lot of times if this occurs in a neighborhood where the property values aren’t so high or a house needs work, it’s not even worth it and the place is just abandoned. It’s so heartbreaking. But one little piece of paper can prevent all of that from being lost.

I remember having a client tell me her parents had to drive two states away to find a bank to make a loan for their family to buy a house. In the ’50s and ’60s and still today, there are so many barriers to homeownership. Somebody not having a simple transfer-on-death deed can lead a family to lose their home as an asset. We’ll take referrals from the neighborhood groups who send us families. Maybe a family is living in Mom’s house, Mom died, they’re paying the taxes and taking care of it, but they’re not in the title. So we help fix some issues. We also do regular clinics to make sure people have access to estate planning documents. We can only do so much ourselves, and that’s why we bring in other resources as we do with pro-bono partnerships so we’re able to do more.

In the last three years, we’ve opened about 300 cases, done about 50 estate planning or title consolidation cases per year, and we do about 50 problem property cases per year where we affirmatively file lawsuits with respect to vacant and abandoned properties. There are over 20,000 vacant properties in the City of St. Louis, and maybe the City owns about half. The other half is owned by people who have long been dead or LLCs in which who knows where the owners are. We have to look at each property and untangle it like a knot or a big ball of yarn. 

Each property is different and each item behind why the property is vacant or abandoned needs to be sorted out before that property can be put back into productive use. So we work with neighborhoods to identify their priorities and what they want us to work on. They point and say, “It’s this one next to the school. It’s this one next to the bus stop. It’s this one on this block where we want to put a park or community garden.” In each neighborhood, we figure out what their priorities are and start untangling that knot.

During the day, we wear our lawyer hats and untie these knots, property by property. Then we all also give a lot of our time to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, working with City departments and other non-profit service providers to come up with big-picture solutions. And for us, that’s another way to get that same goal. Yes, we can solve problems in the immediate sense, but is that going to fix systemic things long-term? We need to focus on other types of advocacy, collaborations, and policy.

Doing the work you do with housing and real estate and being from St. Louis, what are you thinking about as you’re seeing all the vacant houses when you drive through the City?

I’m always working. My partner’s probably used to it now because it’s been almost 12 years doing this work, but I’ll always be looking for addresses. I have an app on my phone. I know how to look up who the owner is. I get the parcel number. And then when I get home, I go into the City's land title system. So it’s just constant. There are 10,000 problems to solve all over. When I drive around, it’s like, “I wonder how that property got to be that way? What is the story behind that one?” They’re often terribly tragic: someone died, there was a fire, somebody was evicted. But in order to take that property and turn it into something positive, you have to understand how it got there in the first place to fix the problems associated with the title and then try to push the place back out to somebody who can do something with it. We’ve got a lot of stories like this because we do like 50 of these cases a year. There’s this physical blight that you see, but then there’s this hidden legal blight. That’s where our team really gets into it. Like, “What are all of the other issues that aren’t visible but just as much of a barrier to solving a problem as fixing up the roof or windows or whatever it is?”

People from Saint Louis University School of Law, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, and Community Builders Network did a forum on vacant properties in 2016. They asked me to come to St. Louis to talk about what we were doing about them in Kansas City. That’s when I met some of my future friends, colleagues, and collaborators. And one of them was Tonnie Glispie-Smith, who won a CBN award in 2020 and is really involved in the West End Neighborhood Association. She’d call me when I still lived in Kansas City and ask, “What do you think about this property? How about this other one?” So it made it easy to know that there would be neighborhoods that could benefit from this type of assistance.

One of the first cases she ever asked me about was a duplex in the West End. It had long been vacant more than 10 or 15 years and they had tried everything to get that house fixed up. They tried calling the Citizens’ Service Bureau, calling the police, talking to the alderperson. They just couldn’t make anything happen. They found buyers who wanted to purchase that property and fix it up. And it was just a terrible situation — a violent situation happened inside the place while vacant, it was really overgrown, people found guns and drugs inside and out. It was a nightmare for those who lived around there.

Well, we started looking at it and untangling the knot. We found there were actually two parcels of land — one from the family the owner inherited and the other he purchased from the LRA long ago. And even when the neighborhood would send interested buyers, he had a title issue because when he took the title to that property, there was a mistake in the legal description. So Tonnie told me, “If I have this property owner call you, can you help him? He wants to sell it. He just can’t. He’s stuck with it.”

We went through 20 or 30 years of records to figure out what the issue was and it turned out the title problem was preventing the property from being sold. The guy was a senior and a veteran and just couldn’t afford an attorney. It would have cost a good chunk of change he didn’t have. So we worked with the owner to fix it and he was able to sell the house. He wasn’t being prosecuted in housing court anymore. He wasn’t spending tons of money having to secure the property. He sold it and got some money out of it. And now the house is fully renovated or pretty close. So that was an early win for us.

Ya know, sometimes we’re the stick and we’ll file a case against an absentee property owner. But that was a case where we got to be the carrot. We were the good guy and we got to help that owner fix the title issue to sell it.

How do you see the trickle-down effect of that story impact the community and the street?

Disinvestment is contagious. Vacancy is contagious. When one house becomes or is vacant, it takes a negative toll emotionally on the people living nearby. Like, “Why should I keep putting money into my house? I’m never gonna get it out because my property value’s always gonna be hurt by that vacant property across the street. Why should I even care?” But the opposite is also true. So when somebody sees a house being renovated, it’s like, “Yeah! Things are moving in the right direction.” It makes people feel more comfortable and want to invest in their own community. It inspires hope. This property’s not just stuck in this terrible purgatory anymore. There’s going to be a new homeowner soon and new kids on the street and more money for the school district and eyes on the street if someone needs help or something. More people help to build community because they can now call that neighborhood or house or block ‘home.’

Who owns these abandoned properties you and your team file lawsuits against to force them to  sell or repair their home and why might they not want to sell it?

Sometimes the owner is just stuck and sometimes the owner just doesn’t want to do anything. Occasionally, we’ll encounter an owner who says, “No, this house of mine is not a problem,” when all the other facts say that it is: there have been all kinds of break-ins, the property’s caught on fire, it’s collapsing. And an owner will say, “I don’t care. I don’t want to fix anything up. I’m not gonna sell it. I’m not gonna demolish it. I’m not gonna donate it. You just have to take me to court.” And we will do that over and over and over again. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

There are few reasons why people don’t budge. They might have an emotional connection to a property. They might not want to let it go because maybe it was Grandma’s house. So when the neighborhood is negotiating with an owner, or we’re doing it as their attorney, it’s like, “If that house means so much to you, wouldn’t it mean more to have a new family be able to live in it and enjoy it? Because if you don’t do anything, it’s gonna fall over or the City’s going to demolish it. What does that do for that memory you’re holding onto?”

Then there are owners who have a higher opinion of the property’s value than what they think it is. Maybe they overpaid and they’re embarrassed and don’t want to realize they made a bad investment. It’s the sunk-cost fallacy. So they hold on to it thinking something’s eventually going to happen and the house is going to be worth something. But that’s just not the case most of the time. If that house collapses in on itself and it’s demolished, it’s not going to be worth anything. Maybe the lot will be worth something, but not much and probably not in the foreseeable future. So sometimes it’s the economics of people not wanting to give up thinking they can still make money off of it.

I had a case where this guy’s dad’s house was going to collapse. So the neighborhood association found someone to buy it, like, “We think it’s a fair price. You can negotiate.” And the owner said, “It’s not for sale.” He agreed that the price was fair. And if it was any other house, he would have sold it. But he really wanted to make sure his dad’s legacy and place in the neighborhood and community were valued. Well, the neighborhood had an orchard. And they said, “If you can figure out a price for that house so somebody can buy it and fix it up, we can put a bench in our orchard and dedicate it to your dad so his memory always has a place to live on in the neighborhood. And you’ll have a place where you can go to visit that isn’t the abandoned house anymore.” So there are ways to get creative without money or being cutthroat. But every property has a different story behind it and we have to figure out why it is the way it is.

How do you and your team celebrate a win?

Our work is different than a lot of legal aid work. Legal aid is providing assistance to people often at the lowest point in their lives. So we have 80 to 100 attorneys who do things like provide orders of protection for victims of domestic violence, represent tenants in eviction cases, help people get badly needed public benefits. We’re fortunate in that our cases are a bit more optimistic and definitely more visual because we deal with real estate and property. We’ve been working with a photographer who’s helping us document all of our cases and all the befores, afters, and durings. What have we done in our first three or four years? Hopefully, instead of just 300 cases in a report, we’ll have a visual marker to celebrate the milestones. These are real stories and transformations that we should have in print somewhere to show that these tools work. And that’ll be a great way to look back on everything we’ve done, take stock, and be proud. This isn’t overnight work. This takes years and years. Some of the properties we’ve worked with in year one are just coming back on the market.

Were you surprised to get the award this year for collaboration and coalition building?

I didn’t go to my law school graduation. All that award stuff has never really been for me. But this is different because it’s a Community Builders Network award. It’s from our friends, collaborators, people we work with all the time, and it just means a lot. Community development work is really hard. And people know that. We certainly don’t do this work for the money. It is a labor of love for everybody involved and we’re passionate about it. One thing that needs to be celebrated is how hard the work is but how people continue to do it despite the challenges and uncertainty.

- Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative team at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Award for Transparency and Trust

Congratulations to Nikki Woelfel, Vice President of Community Development with Carrollton Bank, recipient of our 2021 Award for Transparency and Trust!

The Award for Transparency and Trust recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:

• Works with honesty and openness and isn’t afraid to be vulnerable, especially when things don’t go as planned.

• Co-creates work with the people and partners they serve and works to build shared trust so that all at the table feel supported and valued as part of the process.

• Embraces mistakes and weaknesses in the open as opportunities to learn and grow.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Nikki to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Nikki had to say.

Nikki Woelfel, Vice President of Community Development with Carrollton Bank (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

Most people don’t come out of the womb or even out of high school or college thinking community development is the work they’re going to do. Oftentimes, they just kind of fall into it. I’ve been in banking since 1999, but I’m not a traditional banker. I worked in marketing for an institution years ago that did a lot of community outreach and investment. When it was purchased, I didn’t know if I’d be able to have the same impact I was having. Then in the luckiest turn of events, Carrollton Bank reached out to me. They have this community feel and giving back is folded into the fabric of who they are — not just the bank but the people they hire. Having the autonomy to work in that space has been an honor. Like you hear from community development workers, it all began for me by happenstance.

Over the years, I was lucky to learn about the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a regulation that’s been around since the ’70s, and how banks must adhere to its principles. So every day I get to look for opportunities to influence people’s lives and make opportunities available for them for wealth building, affordable housing, and livable wage jobs. We try to elevate their lives with opportunities that maybe haven’t been there before. And we partner with quality organizations also doing those things well to bring more opportunities to people.

What’s one of the most memorable stories for why you continue to do the work you do?

One part of doing the work I do that’s the most emotionally meaningful is teaching financial education classes. Prior to the pandemic, I was teaching a class weekly. The thing about it that strikes me so much is that this information is not required learning. People aren’t forced to know this stuff. But mistakes you can make from not having this knowledge can follow you for so many years if not a lifetime. And I bring my personal experiences to class to share how I’ve made a lot of the financial mistakes that I teach about.

I’ve racked up credit card debt. I’ve had an extensive student loan balance. Working for a bank, you learn the tricks of the trade though. So I started learning even more about what it means to have financial wellness and about how your credit and credit score can impact your day-to-day living. That was impactful because it was something I had to go through the trenches about on my own to teach myself.

I remember teaching a class to high school students about student loan debt and trying to educate them on the magnitude of what that means. I said, “You’re going to remember that Nikki Woelfel spoke to you your senior year of high school. And you’re going to remember this conversation when you’re 30 years old and potentially paying back student loan debt.” So everything they learn in that moment might not be pertinent to their lives today, but they walk away with that knowledge, they’re going to keep that forever, and no one can take that away from them.

I was born and raised in Illinois, so I feel like I have the credibility there. Still, it’s never easy because you always have to show up. You always have to be honest and trustworthy. I had a harder time building that trust in Missouri because I was teaching financial classes at night and then driving back to Illinois to my suburban lifestyle. So I try to always show up, be present, and make that a priority. Showing up and being there is the first step.

I was teaching a financial education class talking about credit. And when you do these classes, especially online, the video isn’t always on, so you don’t know if the participants are engaged. About three weeks later, I got an email from one of the participants who said, “Okay, here’s the situation. Here’s how much credit card debt I have. Here’s the balance.” She’s laying out the scenario to me and I was like, “I’m so glad you reached out. This is totally something I can help you with! These are your options.” I walked away from that thinking, “It’s so hard to know sometimes, but people really are listening.” So when she reached out, it was amazing. I knew she had kids because I had seen them in the background. And I just thought, “She’s making a difference in their lives and for their futures too.”

I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t wear designer jeans or have any of those things. So when I went off to college, I had stars in my eyes with those tables at orientation where you could apply for your first credit card. I had VISA cards and a card for American Eagle. And I walked away from college with not just student loan debt but credit card debt. I made those mistakes. I mean, I was a month shy of 18 when I started college. At freshman orientation, how in the world I was able to commit to the amount of student loan debt that I was going to be saddled with? I don’t even know how that’s legal at 17. I had no idea what that was going to mean for me at 21 and then beyond. That’s why when I teach financial education classes, I try to impart on people that the decisions you make early on when credit is available to you can have an impact for years to come, so let’s think logically and wisely about it.

How have you helped people obtain Payment Protection Program (PPP) loans during the pandemic?

PPP has been critical for people during the pandemic. When it rolled out, our bank took it very seriously. Because we’re a community bank, our relationships with customers are personal and one on one. So our relationship managers were working with people on how to fill out the applications and it was really labor-intensive. We heard early how minority-owned and small businesses were having a hard time connecting to PPP lenders. We on the community development side asked, “What can we do?”

We started reaching out to partners and some movers and shakers to connect us with people having those challenges so we could help. During the second round of funding, we worked with business districts to get the word out that we can help with some of the one-on-one applications. What was happening was that folks were filling out information through portals and they didn’t have access to a person to tell them if they made any mistakes. Even I took a couple of applications, and I didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning, but I did my best to try. We set up a hub with a quality control team who knew the ins and outs of the application. I reached out to clients to get their paperwork in order. And on the back end I was always asking our team, “What do I do with this? How do I fill this out?”

I was emailing back and forth, day and night, with this one restaurant. Obviously, restaurants were so hard hit. Eventually, I got to hand-deliver their check. I’ve never been a loan officer, but what a great feeling to know I could help this establishment that needed access to capital. We even emailed to discuss the PPP loan forgiveness piece and the owner was so appreciative. Banks are typically transactional in nature. As a community bank, relationships have to be front and center. That’s what we’re meant to do. The pandemic really shined a spotlight on that.

During the beginning of COVID, we realized small businesses had typically been moving along with transactional relationships with their financial institutions. That probably served them well to an extent because of the nature of their businesses. But when it came time to needing that relationship, not all businesses had that. I’m the chairperson of the Metropolitan Saint Louis CRA Association and we took the pandemic as an opportunity to say, “We need to transition to create programs designed to help educate small businesses on things to keep in mind.” It’s easy to get bogged down with the day-to-day with your business. But sometimes you’re going to need your banker or a relationship with somebody to help you with things like going over your budget and answering questions about the way your business is running.

What was your biggest personal change during the pandemic and how were you able to do your job well?

On March 4th, 2020, about nine days before everything started shutting down, my husband and I brought a foster child home from the hospital. She was 13 days old. I worked on March 3rd, and that was going to be my last day for two months. That was a Wednesday, and that following Friday everyone was working from home and not in the office. I was going to figure out a way to work from home a bit, but then everybody was working from home. It was easier because I didn’t have to miss meetings and I could join in between feedings and all that. It was challenging, but because daycares weren’t open and she was too young to even be in a daycare, we made it work. COVID created a challenge, but it also created an amazing chance for me to have more flexibility and time for our foster daughter.

It’s not lost on me that people have had struggles over the past year. It’s very apparent in the work I’m doing. But, surprisingly, we’ve been able to get things accomplished over this time. I thought it would be natural to hit the pause button on community development because there were so many other emergent needs. I thought we’d need to slow down big projects to focus on food and housing and shelter. And we didn’t do that. There was a lull for a couple of months because I was spending so much time with the baby. But by the time I plugged back in, I was on calls all week.

My colleagues were saying, “So many communities have waited forever for help. They’ve waited forever for investment. They’ve waited forever for assistance and for affordable housing. We can’t take a break because of the pandemic. They’ve waited long enough. Let’s keep working.” So we did. There’s always going to be something. Maybe not a global pandemic. But there’s always going to be someone that says, “Slow down. Maybe it’s not the right time.” People have been hearing that for too long. So let’s keep going.

How do you grapple with working with community partners and have the wherewithal to collaborate in an impactful way?

Sometimes banks can be seen as adversaries. But since the housing crisis of 2008, the banking industry has asked itself, “What can we do to make change?” There are limitations banks have, but opportunities to learn have also been created. We started showing up, and I include myself in that ‘we.’ I started listening to people’s needs. One thing that’s a strength of mine is that I never view a problem as insurmountable. I think there’s always a solution. It’s challenging and we’re one of the most regulated industries in the world. So there are times when there are things we just can’t do. It’s not because we don’t want to, but we can’t. So I always think about how we can figure out ways around it or create solutions to the problem. And there are a lot of systemic challenges we’re all trying to solve in community development.

What’s an example of when you had to be transparent in your work and it worked to your benefit?

I’m part of the group that put together the Gateway Neighborhood Fund. We looked at disinvestment and blight and decay of properties in North St. Louis City and County, and a lot of it ties back to the appraisal gap. And to get a mortgage you have to get an appraisal on a property and it has to appraise for an amount equal to or more than the sales price. So when there’s a gap, mortgages can’t happen due to regulatory limitations. This is an ongoing problem.

Well, an organization from Detroit talked about a product they created back in 2017. We listened intently and their solution was ingenious. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reached out to the Metropolitan Saint Louis CRA Association asking if anything could be done here in St. Louis. Several bankers got together to research and I reached out to St. Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance (SLEHCRA) and Metropolitan St Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council (EHOC). They had been talking about the same thing. I said, “Let’s get together.” So we started having a conversion. It took a long time to button everything up but, over the past three years, we’ve been building this program. 

There have been times when community members have said, “We need this,” and banks would say, “Our regulators won’t let us do that.” It would have been easy to get bogged down in what was needed versus what couldn’t be done because when those things can’t marry, it slows everything down to a halt. But we kept coming back to the table to figure out how we could get around it and solve the challenge to get everyone back on track. And that created a great deal of transparency that ultimately led to trust.

So many talk about the American Dream, and if you’re someone who hasn’t been able to take advantage of that, that can cut to the core. The Dream is homeownership. But there are a lot of people who feel like that’s not an opportunity open to them. We’re working towards a wealth-building American Dream opportunity. I think about that since I came from a less affluent background. But I also think about how my grandparents and great-grandparents owned their homes. Many people can’t say that. That first generation of homeownership for some might begin with the folks we’re helping by starting that process for them now. We can be sad that that started in 2021, or we can be overjoyed that we’ve worked to get here.

Where did you learn to hone that skill of having and developing trust?

It is intentional, but it’s also second nature for me. I don’t have a filter sometimes. I’m someone who’s okay with stopping the conversation to say, “Wait, these are not insurmountable challenges. Let’s talk about this.” With a curious inquisitive mind, I’m not afraid to ask questions. Why does something have to be no? Or, black or white? Isn’t there room in the middle?

When’s a time you had to trust someone to move your work forward?

Sheri Flanigan-Vazquez is an incredible leader at Justine Petersen. She’s super honest, transparent, and trustworthy. But one of the things she has a unique ability to do, which I am not great at and am still learning, is that she doesn’t get emotionally overwhelmed by a problem. I can come into a meeting knowing the challenges we have to solve for and she’s taught me that no matter what the challenges, we can solve for it. And she does it in such a calm and practical way. Peter Hoffman says she’s like a human salt lamp. She can just bring the tension down. I think I’m a little too high-strung to do it the way she does it, but I just love being in a room with her. If I ever experience a problem related to this work, she’s the first person I call.

What’s something you know now about community building that you didn’t when you were younger?

You can’t do it all. Community building means so much. The definition is so broad. It’s important to remember to stay in your lane and focus on things you can have an impact on through your expertise. Don’t get distracted by the things you can’t control. I’ve learned, although I haven’t always embraced it, that change is slow. I follow politics as a frustrating side hobby, and change doesn’t happen overnight. I keep in mind that you can’t just abandon places. Places are going to exist whether you invest in them or not, so why not invest in them? And I’ve also learned that we can too easily let the noise get in, especially local noise, so I try to not get bogged down by the noise of the news. Like, “Oh my gosh, there is so much violence and crime,” and the 30,000-foot belief is that communities are just that way. But we’re talking about people who have lives there. I remember at another job, someone told me, “You’re sending me into this neighborhood, but is it safe for me to go there and do a credit fair?” I said, “You’re probably gonna pass kids waiting for the school bus. It’s going to be 8 a.m. This is where families are raising their kids. Remember that.”

We all have common challenges. They might not all look the same, but there are common themes. That’s what I keep at the front of my mind. My husband is a police officer. He sees some of the worst of society and situations every day. It’s so easy to let that noise in, but you have to step back to see individuals. It’s been a tense seven years for us since Ferguson. There have been times where our conversations have been a little combative. It can happen. We learn a lot from each other from that too. It’s easy for him to view communities at a high level thinking they’re full of drugs and crime and bad actors. So I always try to say, “There are families there — folks getting up every day and sending their kids to school. Those families deserve to have flourishing lives like everybody else.”

- Nikki Woelfel, Vice President of Community Development with Carrollton Bank

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Nikki at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

2021 Rising Star in Community Building Award

Congratulations to Latasha Barnes, Attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, recipient of our 2021 Rising Star in Community Building Award!

The Rising Star in Community Building Award recognizes a person who:

• Demonstrates strong dedication to and passion for community building work.

• Exhibits leadership, vision, and a commitment to action and results.

• Shows promising potential to catalyze outstanding impact in community building policy, investment, and/or community change.

• Works to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.

Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Latasha to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Latasha had to say.

Latasha Barnes, Attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)

What was the first award you ever got?

You know when you get honor roll certificates in school? It’s like, ‘Yay! I remembered a bunch of facts.’ But my favorite award was when I was in high school. My senior year I was voted Most Likely to Become the First Female President. Like, what? And then in law school, I got the Saint Louis University School of Law’s David Grant Clinic Student Award for some work I was doing. I will say there are times I’ve gotten awards and felt like, ‘Yes, I did that. I accomplished that.’ But this time, I was notified of the award and I didn’t have the same feeling. Because, really, the work comes from the residents. All I do is stand with them. This is their award. They earned it. Yes, we collaborate, but this is about their effort, vision, and passion for their communities and about their dedication. They’re the ones who inspire me. What am I doing here having this conversation? They should be having this interview talking about how much they love Hyde Park and the West End and Academy and Old North.

If anything, I feel like a spotlight because when I’m advocating for my clients in court or in community meetings or through collaborations with other agencies, I am shining a light on the residents so people see them clearer. Maybe I’m the one on the microphone, but I want people to hear them. I’m just saying, “Look at my residents. Look at my clients. Look at my friends,” because some of them have become friends now, and, “hear what they’re saying. I’m just saying what they’re saying. You shouldn’t respect it coming from me more than when it is coming from those who are the most impacted.” It frustrates me when people say, “You’re a lawyer. We’re listening.” I’m like, “No, if you listened to them the first time, we wouldn’t have to come to court and say these things or take some of the other actions we do on the legal side.”

I was shocked and humbled that people would nominate me for this award. It was their way of saying thank you for how I show up for them, but I should be thanking them because a lot of what I do in my work is driven by what their desires are. We’re not creating new visions for them. They already have these visions and dreams. I’m just pointing them in the right direction, saying, “Here’s a pathway. Here’s an open door. Here’s the administrative process that allows you to get your message out front and center.”

What has been the hardest thing for you when challenging the status quo with the hope of achieving the results you get in the community?

When we think about community development, redevelopment, and commercial development, a lot of times the people who have the money and power are the ones making the decisions about communities. They’re telling residents, “This is what we’re doing and this is what’s going to happen.” One way we can challenge that is by amplifying the residents we serve and allowing them to be the decision-makers about what housing is developed in their communities and what commercial businesses will be invited in and supported. Mobilizing the residents and giving them a voice at the table is so they can participate in the process. That challenges the status quo because, without their input, things will continue to be done the same way and happen ‘to’ communities instead of ‘with’ communities. The biggest thing lawyers like me can do is help residents and communities be a part of what’s happening around them so they can steer things in a way that reinforces their values and supports their vision for their neighborhoods.

When was a time you felt most alive doing the work you do?

There was a vacant property that residents had been concerned about for several years. The neighbors who live on either side and across the street had been complaining about it for quite some time. The yard was overgrown. There were a lot of weeds. People had been dumping trash there. It was unsecured, meaning the windows or doors had been open. There was a lot of trespassing happening. The neighbors had been complaining and filing reports with the City, calling the police about it, and trying to get the owner to improve its condition. 

Well, the neighborhood brought this property to our attention because its vacancy brought in a lot of unwanted activity and safety concerns. No one had any way of communicating with the person who abandoned the property. The police wanted to enforce the trespassing laws, but the owner was not available to press charges. The building inspector wanted to enforce the building codes and cite the owner, but the owner was not responsive. City agencies were at a standstill because they didn’t have the cooperation of the house’s owner. So we were able to file a lawsuit on the building and get permission from the court to take possession of the property to help enforce those rules.

A cross-agency team worked to coordinate our efforts and we showed up at the house together — and this is one of my favorite moments of doing this work because we were all there as a group to take back this property so the neighborhood could clean it up, get it fixed, and hopefully see a new family move into it soon. There were four or five officers in uniform, the neighborhood improvement specialist, a private developer, the president of the neighborhood association, the alderwoman, the building inspector, and myself. And we all represented different government agencies, organizations, and parts of the system. 

So we pulled up, took out the court order, and talked to the trespassers who claimed they had the right to be there. We knew that wasn’t the case. We told them we had permission to come in, inspect, and assess the condition of the building. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we hadn’t told the judge what was happening and shared the neighborhood’s safety and health concerns. Showing up with that piece of paper made a world of difference. Since that time we have been able to secure the property, which made the neighbors really happy.

As lawyers, we recognize we can’t do this type of work by ourselves. We need the support and collaboration with other agencies that have the power to do things we can’t do. And on that particular day, we were all there in alignment. It was so perfect. And this is gonna sound so corny, but — I really like Marvel films! — and you would have thought we were the Justice League or the Avengers. We were all there, we were all ready. Everybody had their superpower. Everybody had their role and they were there to play their role so we could accomplish what we needed. The neighborhood association and residents were there to coordinate the process. The inspector was able to find out what was going on with the building. The police were able to remove the individuals who brought crime and safety concerns to the block. Together, we restored a level of safety for the neighbors. Now, the neighborhood has possession of the building. It’s being cleaned up and we have a contractor rehabbing it.

What’s the biggest obstacle in the work you do? How difficult can it be when you’re looking at the light at the end of the tunnel and it just takes time to get there?

There are so many vacant, abandoned properties. The hardest part we do is finding individuals willing to partner with neighborhoods to address these concerns and realize they’re probably not going to get rich in the process — especially during a time when it’s hard to find labor, material costs are increasing, and the housing market has a shortage. What we do also depends on the availability of private developers or contractors who care about these communities, who want to engage in this work, and who recognize there may not be a substantial profit to be made. We have one property that needs over $300,000 worth of improvements to restore it to its former glory. People may be able to invest that money and maybe they’ll break even, but they do it because they care about the community. That is the biggest challenge because our clients may not have the resources to fix or repair these houses. They have to depend on others to make things happen and sometimes it doesn’t seem profitable enough to do it. If we can’t find a rehabber for a project, everything comes to a pause. We can’t move forward on a property if there’s no one to invest in it. Imagine preparing a case for trial, going in front of a judge, getting that final victory, and not being able to find anyone to say, “We care enough about this building to fix it up so the family across the street doesn’t have to live in front of a crumbling four-family flat.”

Building up the infrastructure in our neighborhoods supports our city and our region in ways you can’t imagine. But there’s an incongruity where the people who actually care enough to do it, may not have the skills, resources, or money to take on the number of properties in disrepair. And those who have the skills, resources, or money may not care enough to join the effort. Often the neighbor who has to look out their window at the crumbling house next door, worried that it is collapsing or could collapse onto their property, will step up to fix a house or two near them and restore their neighborhood if they could. Why wait for the private market to decide they care enough to do it when you can be a part of the effort to alleviate environmental hazards for the people who live there?

What’s your connection to St. Louis and why do you care so much about the work you’re doing here?

I was born in St. Louis, and I lived in a six-family unit in the West End off of Cabanne across the street from Russell Park. My family attended church in the neighborhood and has a lot of ties there. We moved to Atlanta when I was young and I came back here for law school. When I saw the opportunity to do the work I’m doing in this neighborhood, it was like coming back home. This is where I lived. These are streets I used to walk. This is a park I used to play in. It felt so familiar to me because it is. This is a community I remained a part of and my family remains connected to after so many years. Supporting residents who care about this neighborhood has been really important to me. Sometimes when I see the level of disinvestment in parts of St. Louis, or when I drive through the City or County and see rows of vacant, collapsing homes, it can create this intense feeling of hopelessness. I used to have those feelings of hopelessness, but now I know there are solutions.

My son is 17, but when he was a kid, several large anchor stores in our neighborhood started closing. There were these massive empty buildings in our neighborhood and he and I would ride past them and play this game: I would ask him, “What would you open there? What kind of business would you put in that building? What would it look like?” He was a kid in elementary school at the time and he always came up with some cool ideas. He thought of a Chuck E. Cheese or something similar to Monkey Joe’s or Sky Zone. We didn’t have anything like that in our neighborhood or on our side of town at all. He’d say, “We can put that here! And what if we had a go-cart place? Mom, there’d be pizza and a Subway!” It was so cute. As he'd just think of stuff I’d ask, “Who would work there?” and he’d name people in our family. There we were, a legal aid attorney and an elementary student, making stuff up. We didn’t have the resources or skills to do any of it, but, “It would be really cool if we could turn that old Lowes into a rock climbing gym!” At that time, the only thing I knew about development was that you needed people with capital to come in and create businesses. So we’d just dream about how we could make a Magic House in North County and North City. Then all the kids who went to school in Kirkwood could come over to our neighborhood and play in the castles over here.

Stores and restaurants started closing where I currently live too. These buildings are just sitting empty and I wondered, “What’s happening?” When you get buildings neglected over a decade and they’ve partially collapsed, you think about what that means for the people who live near them. My cousin bought her first house next to a long-standing vacant property. I’d visit and hear her talk about concerns she had about what might be happening in that house and the condition of it affecting her and her son living next door. It’s easy to turn a blind eye to things when you’re not personally impacted. This work has given me a greater level of empathy for residents and friends who live in high-vacancy communities. They don’t deserve that. We all deserve to live in communities we can be proud of. St. Louis should feel like home to everybody who lives here.

I watch residents get together and support each other and they really fight for what they believe. They’re fighting against elements that detract from their neighborhood. They have development meetings, pop-ups at parks, and community cleanups. And people from one neighborhood support and attend events from other neighborhoods nearby. They’re so connected. For example, there was a conditional use zoning hearing a couple of months ago and residents from other neighborhoods came out to show their support saying, “Nope. We’re doing this together because what affects you over there affects us over here.” I love that they have that synergy. I’m lucky I get to be a part of it.

What would make a difference for the work you’re doing now and especially when we come out of the pandemic?

I want people to desire to live in the neighborhoods I work with the way they might desire to live in Clayton, Ladue, Chesterfield, or the Central West End. The residents I work with love their neighborhoods and I want them to have neighborhoods deserving of them — neighborhoods that are safe and developed, that look the way the residents want them to look, where building codes are enforced like in other places, where permitting processes work the same as in other places. They deserve better than what they’ve been getting.

More collaborative urban planning would make a tremendous difference in how neighborhoods look and develop, as would working with communities to develop neighborhood plans. Some neighborhoods have established plans, but the ones I work in do not. Oftentimes professional urban planning has not been available to neighborhoods north of Delmar and historical planning efforts have not included residents in a meaningful way. Having resident voice at the table is important and necessary. It is better than making decisions in a vacuum without input from the people impacted by them. It’s about making sure residents are consistently part of the decision-making process and that their perspectives are heard, respected, and incorporated into the outcomes. Planning would help a lot of our neighborhoods better implement their vision to create communities they can continue to be proud of.

What are some of the high-level band-aid fixes you see when a neighborhood plan isn’t in place?

If there was a plan in place for a neighborhood that outlines what they aspire to, how many single-family homes and multi-family homes they want to build, and how and where they want them placed, you wouldn’t have as many big-money private developers swooping into neighborhoods to build housing that residents don’t want. If there was a plan for what businesses were allowed in our commercial districts, we wouldn’t have as many predatory businesses swooping in to buy properties and set up businesses residents don’t want. There are development tools available to help address and prohibit some of these things. Other neighborhoods have them — just not always the neighborhoods I work with. 

So say somebody wants to open up a new liquor store. The band-aid for that might look like showing up at administrative hearings to fight and convince the excise division that the establishment shouldn’t have a full-package liquor license because of ongoing safety concerns. The reality is that if there was a plan in place that regulated if and when a store could operate, this would be an issue for residents to address in a piecemeal fashion. Residents may know they can go to their alderperson and complain. Beyond that, they may not know if they establish a Special Use District, they wouldn’t have to chase behind these types of bad actors. They can establish a protective bubble that prevents unwanted development from coming into the neighborhood in the first place. Instead of fighting it one by one, guidelines can be in place to provide greater protections and transform the way a lot of things happen. 

A neighborhood plan is expensive to develop, technical assistance is often needed, and many neighborhoods may not have access to be able to build one. And that’s what they need to protect themselves from outside influences that can take advantage of their communities.

Is there an inspirational person in your life or a mentor who’s driven you to do community development work?

That’s a hard question because this work is new for me. I’m learning from my colleagues and picking up information all the time from whoever is willing to talk to me. I’ve learned a lot from the residents I work with. Some have been doing this for years. They love it, understand how important it is, and know how to use systems to get the most benefit for their neighborhoods. So I watch and learn from them. Then, being a part of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative and connecting with people who are developers and people in the financial industry, I’m gleaning a little here and there — just taking direction where I can.

What does community building mean for a place like St. Louis?

Community building means we can create a place where our values are truly reflected in how we build and sustain our neighborhoods. Through building that is resident-driven, we can create a St. Louis that feels like home to everybody. That resonates with me because it does not feel like home for everyone. We live here, but some of us live in places because we have to and not because we really desire to. If we had our choice, we might go somewhere else. But in my head, when something feels like home, it’s where you want to be and you’re able to access what you need to thrive. It’s important to feel like you belong, you’re safe, and that there’s no place you’d rather be because your neighborhood is the absolute best and most desired. St. Louis can be that for everyone.

- Latasha Barnes, Attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Latasha at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!

Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.

Congratulations to our 2021 Community Building Awards Honorees!

We’re thrilled to be honoring six incredible awardees (four individuals, one initiative, and one organization) at our 2021 Community Development Family Reunion on September 23!

We’re also excited to be working with the talented Humans of St. Louis team again this year to put together stories about the important community building work that each of these honorees is doing. Watch our website in September for a special post about each awardee!

2021 Community Building Awards Honorees

The Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri
Collaboration & Coalition Building

WEPOWER
Growing in Equity & Antiracism

Nikki Woelfel
Vice President - Community Development, Carrollton Bank
Transparency & Trust

Sundy Whiteside
Walnut Park East Resident; Board President, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations (SLACO); and Co-Chair, St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative Vacancy Advisory Committee
Resident Leadership

Latasha Barnes
Attorney, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri
Rising Star in Community Building

Barbara Levin
Teaching Professor, Office of Field Education, Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis
Lifetime Dedication to Community Building

Come help us celebrate these incredible folks on September 23!