In this series, authors will explore how individuals and communities imagine new ways to lead change, new mindsets to approach complex issues, and new strategies to align leadership theory and practice. We will share examples of how local leaders address global issues, highlighting leadership perspectives and strategic change actions.
In this blog, Josh Brewer illustrates the challenges associated with neighborhood revitalizations through an adaptive, critical lens. He describes how the practice of “Front Porch Conversation,” disrupted dominant expert-driven practices and centered resident experience in improving the quality of life of neighborhoods.
On an unusually hot summer evening in Kansas, two homeowners sat in their driveway anxiously waiting near a cooler of iced drinks. Over the prior two weeks, they had walked up and down their neighborhood, knocking on doors, posting flyers, and sticking yard signs in front lawns. “Front Porch Conversation,” the signs read, promoting the first step, a conversation, in a grassroots neighborhood revitalization process for the older Manhattan neighborhood that residents affectionately call “So Po.” Some say the term was derogatory decades ago, “so poor on the Southside,” but the new residents are reclaiming it as South of Poyntz, a primary corridor in town.
As we sat waiting, sweat already beading on our brows, neighbors started arriving on foot and on bicycle, smiling as they reconnected with neighbors after a year of COVID lockdown, and curiously glancing at the large white tear sheets posted to the resident’s garage door. Despite the oppressive heat, people had come to hear their neighbor’s experiences, to share what they loved about their neighborhood, and to imagine how their community could become better for everyone.
As the group took their seats, I introduced Habitat for Humanity’s belief that quality of life, our shared, collective experience living in a place, can be improved through asset-based community development. This work begins with community dialogue to identify strategies to build sense of community, social cohesion, and collective action. With greater capacity for collective action within the neighborhood and broad coalitions, Habitat has seen high-impact sustainable change in those sectors—housing, education, economic development, safety, and more—that influence residents’ quality of life.
Depending on your perspective, neighborhood revitalization can represent a solution to a blighted, dangerous, or embarrassing section of a town or city, or it can represent a threat—interest in your neighborhood by wealthy investors in search of capital assets to develop, or a middle class with enough mobility to acquire properties. From a city or county government’s point-of-view, neighborhood revitalization represents an opportunity to increase revenues based on property values, decrease crime, and improve local school performance.
For Habitat for Humanity, asset-based community development means partnering with neighborhood residents, city and county governments and other non-profit and for-profit organizations to address community concerns that overshadow community assets and lower the quality of life for residents. This work requires broad, collective leadership from multiple organizations, while offering a new approach to the power dynamics at play in neighborhood revitalization projects. By empowering resident leaders and facilitating a process that allows the lived experience to emerge as aspirations and concerns, our team can improve quality of life by increasing sense of community and social cohesion toward collective action.
This work necessarily recognizes that the challenge of neighborhood revitalization is complex, without easy answers, and requires the development of an adaptive leadership practice (Heifetz et al., 2009). This work has no clear solution, so it requires constant learning, and involves stakeholder engagement at every level rather than a simple exercise of authority. It is distinguished from technical work where solutions are defined, and expertise can drive action.
The leadership practice required of change agents is not only adaptive but involves coordination and cooperation with technical expertise from those within the construction trades, municipal planning, economic development, and transportation sectors. Rather than taking the traditional interventionist approach as an outside actor, our organization looks to resident leaders for this adaptive work. In identifying, coaching, and supporting resident leaders, we hope to practice what Raelin (2011) calls “leaderful development.” Raelin (2011) explains, “What makes the change agent of leaderful development unique is his or her commitment to learning that is sufficiently participant-directed that learners comprehend, by the agent’s practices, including his or her communication with them, that leadership can be a shared mutual phenomenon” (p. 205). In support of that work our processes invite participant direction through the conversation structure and through the follow up conversations where resident leaders identify opportunities for interventions.
Our work also recognizes the racialized history of neighborhood revitalization in this country and the ongoing effects of gentrification on low-income communities and aims to disrupt the hegemonic race-and wealth-based power dynamics using tools of deconstruction and reconstruction (Dugan, 2017). In our work, deconstruction is a process where we challenge the assumptions and commonly accepted stories that reflect and constitute power relations in the community, which we bring about through powerful questions. For example, we may ask: “Who all could be involved in repairing that sidewalk? Who might be inadvertently left out of the discussion?”
Next, we do not stay in the mode of critical deconstruction, but launch headfirst into the practice of reconstruction, where we ask residents to put forward their dreams for their community and then ask how we might go about that work through small experiments that build sense of community, social cohesion, and collective action. In our conversations, we particularly rely on tools of reconstruction by cultivating agency, building interest convergence, disrupting normativity, and attending to power.
Table 1
Critical approaches to neighborhood revitalization
| Reconstruction Tool | Activities |
| Cultivating Agency | Center neighborhood residents in the decision-making process. |
| Building Issue Convergence | Move from individual and household level analysis to system level analysis of the housing system to encourage systemic change. |
| Disrupting Normativity | Focus on community assets, rather than liabilities, and reframe concerns around asset realization.
Speak to experiences where social cohesion and sense of community led to collective action and challenge participants to apply those lessons to current challenges. |
| Attending to Power | Address willful blindness by explicitly asking who benefits from the status quo and what loss would look like and for whom if change were to occur. |
Note. Adapted from Dugan (2017)
This Front Porch Conversation series has offered another possibility for external, expert-driven neighborhood revitalization projects by centering resident experience in improving the quality of life of neighborhoods. By focusing on community assets rather than deficits, this work can begin building community power through asset development. This broad, community power is built through coalitions and represents a stark contrast from the centralized power dynamics often perpetuated by neighborhood revitalization initiatives. From these distinctions, more effective interventions can be designed and, ultimately, a higher quality of life can be achieved for everyone in the neighborhood.
For the residents of the SoPo neighborhood, the primary asset identified was the nearby City Park and the opportunity for neighborhood children to play with one another while parents socialize. However, many residents identified safety issues—speeding vehicles in the neighborhood and an unsafe crosswalk—as the primary issue hindering the realization of those assets. Through discussion, many identified the upcoming leaf raking season as an opportunity to get together for a Fall Cleanup to support older residents in home preservation and sidewalk maintenance. Four months after that sweltering summer conversation, more neighbors approached that same driveway with rakes in hand. As they raked and shared stories, hopes and concerns, a pickup soccer game started in the street. Passing cars slowed and parents laughed over coffee and homemade breakfast tacos. After the event, neighbors celebrated over beers in the autumnal sun and asked, what next?
References
Dugan, J. P. (2017). Leadership theory: Cultivating critical perspectives. Jossey-Bass.
Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership. Harvard Business Review Press.
Raelin, J. (2011). From leadership-as-practice to leaderful practice. Leadership, 7(2), 195–211.
About the author
Josh Brewer is the Executive Director of the Manhattan Area Habitat for Humanity and an adjunct instructor in the Staley School of Leadership Studies, where he teaches LEAD 405: Leadership in Practice. Josh is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Leadership Communication from Kansas State University, with an interest in the role of communication and grass-roots organizing in community problem solving.
