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September 2001
'We are such
stuff as dreams are made of...'
The phrase "Community Development" appears often
throughout this VOICE and its four-page insert. "What,"
you say, "is community development?"
Well, community development is about technical terms such
as low-income housing, UHORP and tax credits, capacity building,
housing pipelines, pre-qualifying for a mortgage, 50% of median,
welfare-to-work, and community organizing.
And community development is also about tangibles such as
lower Broadway, the Housing Resource Center, the Samaritan
Project, St. Philip's Houses, Resurrection House, Opportunity
Partners, Family Preservation and Avon Avenue.
In truth, like most of you I can't expound in any great technical
detail about the above terms and programs. But they are critical
to our diocese's community development efforts, one of our
most important ministries and one of which we should all be
proud.
Community development is ultimately about helping both individuals
and communities to have a better quality of life, and the
Episcopal Church has been about that work for a long time.
But, over the past 10 years, this ministry has taken a new
and exciting form under the overall title of community development,
a more focused effort to deal not with the symptoms of social
problems, but rather the problems themselves.
By an informal count, there are about a dozen Community Development
Corporations (CDCs) currently sponsored by some level of the
Episcopal Church in our diocese. Most, like All Saints, Hoboken;
Christ, Hackensack; St. John's, Boonton; and St. Paul's, Paterson,
to name just a few, are sponsored by local congregations.
Another group is sponsored by our diocese through the Diocesan
Council. Four of these CDC's, Episcopal Community Development
(ECD), St. James CDC, the Jersey City Episcopal CDC and Apostles'
House, have put together a special supplement to this issue
of The VOICE that describes their work in more detail.
Early in my episcopate, I asked John Zinn, CFO and diocesan
staff person for community development, to arrange for me
to visit each of these four CDC's. It was an incredibly moving
experience. At Apostles' House in Newark, we sat in the living
room of the family shelter and listened to a group of single
mothers tell their stories. Stories of neglect, substance
abuse and domestic violence, but also stories of resurrection
and hope, stories of how through Apostles' House, they were
reclaiming their lives. Further to the north, in the lower
Broadway section of Newark, we saw over 50 units of low- income
rental housing and the future sites for over 30 units of new
for- sale housing, again for low income home buyers. But what
we saw were not just the sites of 80 new units of housing;
what we saw was a community being transformed by the St. James
CDC.
Housing was also the main item on the tour of Episcopal Community
Development's work in the South Ward, new and renovated housing
being sold to first-time low income home buyers. Of special
interest were 30 two-family homes, almost all newly built,
going up in a five- block area. This is nothing less than
the creation of a new community. Moving from Newark to Jersey
City, we saw some of the almost 200 housing units operated
by the Jersey City Episcopal CDC. But equally important was
learning about the CDC's Opportunity Partners Program, a program
that is helping the chronically unemployed acquire the skills
to become self-supporting.
You can imagine my feelings at the end of each of these tours;
I was proud to be part of such a diocese. I encourage you
to read the supplement about the CDCs that will give you a
fuller picture of their work and ministry. But beyond reading
about the CDCs, I encourage you to get involved in this ministry.
The supplement will give you information about how to do that;
I can promise you that it will be a rewarding experience.
Yes, housing, community organizing, welfare to work, these
are some of the things that community development is made
of. And these are also the things, that in Shakespeare's words,
"dreams are made of."
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