Reclaiming Your Community: You Don't Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One

by Majora Carter

When the nonprofit industrial complex is working well in low-status communities, activists, government agencies, and philanthropists robotically sing the same dirge, heralding their preferred default development attributes that have been sung for decades. Here’s what it looks like: Low-income rental housing, usually with space reserved for a community center. A plethora of programs for poor people allegedly designed to help move them out of poverty. Such programs are proposed and executed by various nonprofit actors (the ones from outside the community are consistently funded at levels much higher than local activists’) or city agencies and supported by philanthropic or public funds. A static poverty rate. Although the rate doesn’t budge, more of the same type of programs are spawned year after year.