Grantee Partner Spotlight with Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (LCDC)

This month, Woods Fund Chicago sat down with Richard Townsell, Executive Director of Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (LCDC). Richard talks about community development, building power, and how accountability makes Lawndale a better neighborhood for its residents.

What do you love about the neighborhood of North Lawndale and what do you aspire to see in your community?

I love the people of North Lawndale and I want to see our ambitions and plans come to life. The NLCCC Quality of Life Plan needs to be resourced.  Development without displacement.

The Quality of Life Plan was done a few years ago as part of the LISC [Chicago] effort for quality of life plans for neighborhoods. The plan was done for the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council (NLCCC), which is sort of the umbrella organization in North Lawndale that oversees a plan. There are 13 committees all staffed by volunteers and community residents. And the goal is to make sure that things that happen in the community are in concert with the Quality of Life Plan.  I co-chair the Housing Committee, and there's an economic development committee, health and wellness, transportation, safety, youth and recreation, workforce — just about everything that you would imagine. Community Development is a very broad term and it encompasses everything that impacts a community. We don’t have the luxury to leave anything out because we need it all.

What are some core values and/or principles that drive the organization’s work?

Relational Power, building key relationships with neighbors and stakeholders, collaboration — because no organization can or should do it all — and accountability. 

Our homeowner's association is largely the entity that keeps us accountable. We meet monthly. We have some leaders that have been trained in the principles of community organizing. We hold ourselves accountable for dues, we hold ourselves accountable for results, we hold ourselves accountable for turnout, and then we hold other entities accountable for results, as well.

We're pushing the city to get these vacant lots to us so we can build new homes. We held the library accountable. The library looked like a prison, and we pushed then-Mayor Emanuel to put $2.5 million in our library and now it looks like a brand new library. We hold the park district accountable when young people wanted to rename the park “Frederick Douglass,” instead of “Stephen Douglas.” The initiative changed, eventually, to “Frederick and Anna Douglass Park.” Our homeowners were involved with making sure that that happened. So, we're going to hold ourselves accountable. We're also going to hold the city accountable for what it can do. 

How does LCDC utilize community organizing through programs such as the North Lawndale Home Owner Association as a pathway to community development?  

We organize with our neighbors and other local institutions to build power. It is respectful to include people that live in the community on what is going to impact them beforehand. In other communities, this happens, but in black communities, plans get parachuted in on folks. We remind leaders of their power. 

Power is the ability to act; having the ability to win on things that we want to win on. We want to do the research to win a campaign. Our six-month library campaign, for instance.

Douglass library had rat boxes in the children's reading area, it had radiators that were hot to the touch, it had peeling paint and mold, the elevator hadn't been inspected, and the fire extinguishers were expired. We had all these problems, so it was no surprise that no one was going to the library, right? So we put together a campaign where we did an inspection of the library, then took our results to the Chicago Public Library Board meeting. Within a few months, we had the library closed, and they put $2.5 million into the library to make it look beautiful. In addition to that, we made sure that people of color were hired to do the project. We held the board accountable to that. 

And then the next thing we did was we inspected the library when it was about 75% done to make sure that it was done well. Sometimes these jobs are boondoggles for these big contractors. They don't do the same thing in our neighborhood as they do in others. So we had our leaders inspect the library to make sure that it was done well, and then when it was done, we could claim victory. We just got recognition — the North Lawndale Home Owner Association got recognition from the mayor who said it couldn't have happened without us. 

We're trying to put regular folks back into the public square and have a real civics lesson that if you really get engaged to build power, you can win. Everyday folks can win. People in the neighborhood were used to losing. We want to have the kind of power that we could wield to make sure that we don't just have the power to stop or block things, but we also have the power to make things go forward.

Is there any other work you’d like to uplift?

We're working on worker-owned co-ops. There's a piece in Crain’s I was just reading about “character capitalism,” but a lot of it didn't really talk about anything structural.

We think that people in the community should own their labor, and we think that worker-owned cooperatives are a way to help, particularly with this great resignation. People are leaving because they don't have great wages, but also because they don't really have an ownership stake in what happens in the company. And so we believe in worker-owned cooperatives, and we're going to start four to help folks not just work at a job, but also to be owners, and have some stake and say in it. We think that models like this should be replicated. It's a really big thing on the East and West Coast, not really big in the Midwest. We’re trying to figure out how we can — in communities like ours — push not just for entrepreneurship, rugged individualism, capitalism, and owning your own business. How do the workers collectively own and make decisions about the future of companies? We think that there isn't enough work going on in Chicagoland. We put a stake in the ground and try to help that happen.

Learn more about Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (LCDC) here.