Neighborhood Development Champions: Bolstering the Capacity of Community Development Organizations

A Q&A with Edwin Tobar and Mariah Van Ermen 

The Trust established the Flexible Funding program in 2020 to fund key community development organizations whose lack of operating support was limiting their impact. The program’s core priorities were to promote investment in local projects and encourage better coordination. While the program has been a valuable source of support, conversations with grant recipients during the Trust’s strategic refinement highlighted they would benefit from complementary resources in addition to general operating funds. As a result, the program evolved into the Neighborhood Development Champions, which looks to resource selected organizations to help them drive sustainable, community-led investment. 

In December, the Trust provided $1,400,000 in grants to 14 community-based Neighborhood Development Champions (listed below). 

In this Q&A, Community Wealth program managers Edwin Tobar and Mariah Van Ermen share the new direction of the Trust’s neighborhood investment work. 

What are some of the priorities and goals for Neighborhood Development Champions? 

Mariah Van Ermen: The initiative is intended to resource community organizations leading place-based development as a mechanism to generate economic activity and wealth. It has three main components. One is engaging the community because direct input from them is critical to being able to translate community vision into development. We support organizations engaging the community around existing plans or updating the community on plans as they’re implemented. The second is around the Champions’ role as development partners to advance community-driven projects such as grocery stores or markets, community centers, or small business retail. The third is the organizational capacity to support varying needs, such as staff capacity and training, so that an organization can be responsive to development needs. 

Edwin Tobar: Neighborhood Development Champions are established organizations. We’re essentially providing resources for them to do what they have been doing and potentially do more engagement and push for more development and investment. We’re also trying to get increased resources into the hands of the organizations that are already doing a great job of it. 

The Pre-Development Fund has also been relaunched with a new focus. Tell us about that change. 

ET: The Pre-Development Fund has been around for three years and funded 75 different projects. We’ve found that projects were getting off to a strong start but started losing momentum after a certain point. That came down to a couple of reasons. One was capital, not necessarily the access to it, but the fact that it kept getting more expensive. It was also taking longer to overcome bureaucratic hurdles, which then created issues with the capital they had secured, forcing them to go in search of more money and start the cycle again. Another issue was development readiness, which comes down to the amount of knowledge some entrepreneurs had about the development process. Of the 75 projects, between 50 and 60 were led by entrepreneurs trying to develop a property for their business or themselves. It’s not necessarily something they will do in the long term. We realized we needed to address these specific challenges and refine where we were targeting our investment. Our priority now is clustering development near other amenities. By being more strategic, we can help the projects open in their communities. 

How do these two programs individually and collectively reflect the refined direction for the Trust’s community wealth strategy? 

MVE: Our overall community wealth strategy aims to address the entire development timeline. Neighborhood Development Champions represent the community and are the backbone of equitable development. The Pre-Development Fund is our next step in the development process, helping advance specific projects that the Champions raise as community priorities. We also have partners and colleagues thinking further upstream, namely the development environment, regulatory conditions, and other barriers. Then, there’s the connection to large-scale capital grants through We Rise Together that bookend the spectrum to advance further economic activity in the communities that need to see more investment to generate individual, family, and community wealth. 

ET: Our community wealth strategy is focused on creating thriving communities. To do that, we need an environment that promotes development and attracts investment. Once those actual opportunities come up, they need money. We’re directly investing in development and saying this project needs to move forward because it will build wealth in the community. 

MVE: Minimizing displacement is also core to our strategy, so this work has a place-based approach. That means thinking about what is needed in a particular area to drive more spending, foot traffic, and, eventually, the viability of small businesses. Every community has a different flavor of that. Depending on the neighborhood, there may be a need for development to address a vacancy or to ensure existing assets in communities benefit the residents so they can stay. Therefore, the community engagement strategies look different.  

ET: With that comes more say-so than these residents may have in their particular neighborhood, which can increase the likelihood that they can control whether something stays and is accessible and affordable to them. That ties back to a lot of the Champions’ work because they’re pushing for development and ensuring that it’s for their community. We’re also trying to promote tools that give residents control of those assets, ensuring wealth is built for those who need it. 

There is wisdom in working with these established neighborhood-based organizations because they know what community residents want. They know what the neighborhood needs. They’ve been around. They’ve seen the opportunity, the challenges, and all those things. So that makes a lot of sense. Is there anything else you think people should know? 

MVE: In addition to our strategies to catalyze additional traditional development and investment that many communities are familiar with, we recognize the need for newer models of community ownership to address other forms of generating wealth and control. This goes beyond an independent entrepreneur owning their building or project, which is incredibly important, especially for developers of color or entrepreneurs of color. Traditional development doesn’t always serve the purpose of broader community control. We want to be able to learn from new models in shared ownership and engage stakeholders in questions of control, governance, and short- and long-term financial return. 

ET: A throughline for me is the idea that these communities have been asking for things for decades, and they’re getting tired. We’re trying to deliver on the control they’ve been asking for or on the specific developments and assets they need. We’re trying to be intentional in saying we don’t need to merely continue planning. We want to bring the things they have already planned and help them create assets in their community. 

2025 Neighborhood Development Champions

• Austin Coming Together 
• Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council 
• Far South Community Development Corporation 
• Garfield Park Community Council 
• Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation 
• Greater Southwest Development Corporation 
• Inner-City Muslim Action Network 
• Latinos Progresando (Marshall Square Resource Network) 
• Little Village Chamber of Commerce 
• North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council 
• Northwest Side Community Development Corporation 
• Puerto Rican Cultural Center 
• Quad Communities Development Corporation 
• South Shore Chamber Community Development Corporation