Cultivating Community Beyond Church Walls in Indianapolis
P.R. Mallory Campus, home to Purdue Polytechnic High School and Paramount Middle School. Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC) helped in redeveloping the campus. (Source: ECDC.)
Englewood is a tiny swatch of a place within the larger Near Eastside neighborhood of Indianapolis. It’s been home to Englewood Christian Church starting in 1895, and since then, the rise of the Suburban Experiment took its toll on the community, as many of its residents left to live elsewhere. The congregation shrunk in turn, but nevertheless became more engaged in the life of the neighborhood after realizing that some of its own people lived in very poor housing situations. Rallying its members, some of whom had skills in the building trades, the church starting fixing up houses in the neighborhood for congregation members who needed them.
This organic work of care for their own spurred the congregation’s collective imagination about how they could be more deeply engaged with the broader community. Church members realized that they could do similar work to make affordable housing available for their neighbors, too, and so they began to lean into this work. They launched Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC), a separate, though related, non-profit organization. ECDC facilitated the congregation’s work in affordable housing and gave it a presence in larger, city-wide conversations about community development. Although initial efforts in affordable housing were oriented toward home ownership, ECDC learned over time that not all neighbors were ready to own a home, so they began working on affordable rental housing, including converting the long-defunct Indianapolis Public School Number 3, located next door to the church building, into 32 units of rental housing.
The past decade has found ECDC working alongside neighbors in a wide-ranging array of projects, including quality of life planning for the Near Eastside; economic development; prisoner re-entry; hydroponic agriculture; the launching of neighborhood-focused public elementary, middle, and high schools; solar energy development; health and recreation; and more. In all of these efforts, their aim has been to work in a manner that reflects their faith, and to be learning and growing at each step along the way. Over the course of this journey, ECDC has formed three particular convictions that are rooted in the group’s shared Christian faith and that give a distinctive shape to their place-based work.
First, and perhaps foremost, of these convictions is that ECDC aims to be involved in community development work from within the neighborhood. The vast majority of ECDC’s employees live in the neighborhood, and those who do not have other connections to the neighborhood, including being part of the church congregation. Over the last thirty years, the number of church members living in the Englewood neighborhood steadily increased. Today, roughly 75% of the congregation lives within a half-mile radius of the church building. The work that ECDC does is not merely an act of benevolence for their neighbors, but rather is an act of solidarity with neighbors, integrated with their own lives and rooted in the community.
This way of doing community development emphasizes practices of presence and conversation. ECDC strives to receive every neighbor —regardless of the challenges that they might have—as a human being. Listening to neighbors is not just one item on a development project checklist; it is a way of life. Flourishing places, ECDC has found, are ones in which all neighbors feel a significant sense of belonging, in which they are seen, heard, and known.
Conversation is the primary path toward this sort of flourishing, as it creates a space in which neighbors can be seen and heard, and in which they are invited to share their hopes and dreams for the place. These hopes of neighbors are intertwined over time into an emerging and shared vision for how the neighborhood can move forward. Over the last couple of decades, ECDC has empowered neighbors and helped set their dreams into motion, launching an award-winning Mexican restaurant, a nature playspace for children, a rooftop hockey rink, a coffee shop, and a book review magazine, among dozens of other neighbor-driven initiatives.
Conversation also provides space for hearing and examining conflicts and differences of vision among neighbors. Such conflicts are no less messy or painful than elsewhere in our polarized society, but commitments to the place and to receiving neighbors in the fullness of their humanity, allow conversation, and ultimately work, to continue despite disagreements.
Oxford Place Senior Apartments, another ECDC project. (Source: ECDC.)
A second and related conviction is ECDC’s commitment to an asset-based philosophy of community development. This mode of thinking, which is based in a philosophy of gratitude, takes what is already present in a place as its starting point. This approach is central to the way that ECDC understands its faith, and particularly the divine economy of abundance (as opposed to scarcity). As ECDC members understand their Christian faith, they have come to believe that God provides abundantly for all humans and all creatures, but humankind’s long history of fragmentation, greed, and injustice inhibits resources from flowing to all people and all places.
ECDC members believe the greatest asset of any place is its people, so the group focuses on receiving and getting to know neighbors, as described above. But people are not the only asset of a place; land, buildings, businesses, organizations, and many other assets, if received with gratitude, can be leveraged to help it flourish. In many cases (including School Number 3 mentioned above), ECDC has chosen to rehab existing buildings and houses that hold significant memories for neighbors, when it might seem to some to be more efficient to tear down these buildings and start from scratch.
Although an asset-based approach to community development begins with what is already present in a neighborhood, outside resources might be drawn upon as neighbors seek to bring the shared vision of their place to fruition. ECDC has partnered with outside organizations to bring projects in the Englewood neighborhood to completion. After failing in their initial efforts to launch a hydroponic farm that would provide good food and entry-level jobs for neighbors, for instance, ECDC partnered with one of the leading global corporations in the field to plant a high-tech farm in a large, formerly abandoned industrial warehouse.
The Commonwealth Apartments. (Source: ECDC.)
The third and final conviction driving ECDC’s work holds that development is most healthy when it strives to be comprehensive. Affordable housing and job creation are not sufficient on their own; flourishing places need homes, jobs, clean air and water, good food, retail businesses, recreational activities, and healthcare to make for a healthy, interdependent community. ECDC seeks, in its Christian tradition, to heal and restore not just human souls, but human bodies. ECDC has leaned into its faith traditions in its work with Englewood neighbors. At the same time, they recognize their limitations as an organization; they are a relatively small and not equipped to address every challenge their neighborhood might face. Fortunately, the Englewood neighborhood, and the larger Near Eastside in which it is situated, is a rich ecosystem of organizations working together in manifold ways to help the community flourish. ECDC does relatively few types of specific work—property management and economic development, for instance—but it partners with or empowers dozens of other non-profit and for-profit organizations to provide a rich tapestry of care and vitality.
Although there will always be plenty of work to do in the Englewood neighborhood, it is likely that in coming years, as the city and community change, the neighborhood won’t need the sort of large affordable housing or economic development projects that have helped to sustain ECDC over the past decade. Thus, they are beginning to shift a portion of their efforts to a project called Cultivating Communities, in which they draw upon their experience and connections to work with other congregations locally or across the country to help them identify and leverage their particular assets for the flourishing of their places.
Beyond the work ECDC has done in the Englewood neighborhood over the last three decades, they have cultivated a rich legacy of friendships and collaboration with neighbors. The real joy of their work lies in this relational legacy that bears witness to their faith and belief in a God who loves humanity and desires that humans love and care for each other.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books, and an employee of the Englewood Community Development Corporation. He lives and works on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis, and writes about books, literacy, urban places, and the transformative practice of conversation. Find him online at @ChrisSmithIndy and C-Christopher-Smith.com.
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