THE BRONX COOPERATIVE
DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE
The Bronx, New York, is home to a series of valuable assets: major anchor institutions that spend $9 billion each year; New York City’s third largest commercial corridor; the largest food distribution center in the world; and a rich history of sophisticated community-based organizations. It is also the poorest urban county in the country, as well as the county with the worst health outcomes in the state. In recognition of these “hopeful contradictions,” the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative (BCDI) has been creating an innovative model for a just local economy that generates shared wealth for low-income people of color.
Since its inception in 2011, CoLab has been a core partner of BCDI. In the early years of BCDI, CoLab provided crucial support in convening labor, government, business, and community leaders at a multi-stakeholder table to strategize and envision the BCDI model. Many of these critical stakeholders lived alongside each other for decades, but rarely communicated or collaborated before CoLab’s work began.
Our ecosystem approach to building community wealth focuses on convening local anchors and working to align them to collectively leverage their procurement efforts and create opportunities to build shared wealth. Beyond that, we wrap procurement localization into a broader strategy for economic democracy, build coordination and communication capacity with community organizations that can drive a culture of economic democracy and hold anchors accountable.
This approach creates bankable comparative advantages for local businesses. From 2016 to 2020, CoLab worked closely with BCDI to build mechanisms to ensure that marginalized communities will benefit from the investment of public and private dollars in the Bronx. We supported preemptive anti-displacement planning by co-creating a toolkit for Development without Displacement with a key roundtable of community-based organizations. We helped build out the core team of the BronXchange, an online marketplace that connects Bronx institutions and nonprofits with high-road, local businesses. We assembled the advanced manufacturing equipment to turn the Bronx Innovation Factory vision into reality. And we co-designed the aims of the Planning and Policy Lab, a space for anchors, entrepreneurs, community groups and labor to jointly navigate the larger policy and development landscape, deliberate, and make strategic decisions to guide the future trajectory of the Bronx.
FROM PROTEST TO TRANSFORMATION: SAVING INTERFAITH MEDICAL CENTER IN BROOKLYN
In 2012, the Governor of New York announced plans to close Interfaith Medical Center, a critical safety-net hospital in Central Brooklyn. At stake was not only access to healthcare, but also jobs and the loss of a local economic engine. In response to the announcement, the Coalition to Save and Transform Interfaith was formed to mobilize labor unions, community groups, clergy, elected officials, and others to save the hospital. In support of the Coalition’s efforts, CoLab conducted a health needs and assets assessment and proposed a comprehensive “wellness-based development” approach that reorients local healthcare institutions as drivers of community health and community wealth through the economic impact of their operations.
The proposal gave local leaders an alternative to closing the hospital. The Coalition’s tireless efforts—marches, vigils, a play running for weeks in the hospital’s lobby, and an occupation of the hospital— mobilized the entire community. The hospital did not close. Over the next four years, we conducted participatory action research (PAR) projects in neighborhoods throughout the hospital’s service area. We trained over 170 young people in PAR methods and surveyed over 2,500 community members to identify neighborhood-specific assets and needs. The reports and the findings from the PAR projects became the engine for advancing the Coalition’s work and, along with the health needs and assets assessment, helped to inspire a comprehensive New York State health initiative, called Vital Brooklyn, which is now in the process of investing $1.2 billion in building healthy housing, developing green spaces, deploying healthy food trucks, and providing workforce development.
During the height of the COVID pandemic, Central Brooklyn was a COVID hotspot. Interfaith and its network partner hospitals provided much needed capacity to manage the crisis. CoLab brought a tech entrepreneur to the table who worked with the hospitals to create UpAiQ, a smart logistics platform that allows hospitals to track and distribute medical equipment in real time. The platform helped the hospitals distribute ventilators across facilities to meet changing demand. The business, which will have significant community ownership opportunities, is now part of an emerging economic development effort that local leaders call a “Health Enterprise Hub.”
WE FIGHT FORWARD: FIGHTING DISPLACEMENT IN THE BRONX, BROOKLYN, CHELSEA AND EVERETT
CoLab worked with community members and local partner organizations in the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York, and in Chelsea and Everett, Massachusetts, to co-design tools and resources to help community members organize and protect themselves against displacement. Each of these places is facing intense development pressures that threaten to push out communities of color and undermine their wealth and wellbeing.
In the Bronx, we worked with our partner, the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative (BCDI), to convene a Bronx-wide Development without Displacement Roundtable. The Roundtable comprised eight community-based organizations whose efforts culminated in 2018 in a toolkit for development without displacement titled, We Fight Forward. The toolkit includes a list of principles for development without displacement, an online strategic mapping tool, an analysis of a set of core challenges, and strategies to combat those challenges.
In Brooklyn, CoLab has helped advance the Health & Housing agenda of Brooklyn Communities Collaborative, a nonprofit that brings together community-based organizations, labor unions, and education and health institutions to strengthen health, wealth, and leadership in BIPOC communities.
Through interviews and small discussions with community stakeholders, we developed a health and housing assets map, conducted spatial analysis for housing conditions in Central and East Brooklyn, and created visuals to support advocacy efforts. CoLab also collaborated with residents to ensure that the State’s Vital Brooklyn Housing Development initiative will address healthcare worker housing needs and deepen discussions around permanent affordability.
To this end, we jointly proposed having new Vital Brooklyn developments become Community Land Trusts (CLT). Fortuitously, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke’s proposed Affordable Housing and Area Median Income Fairness Act of 2019 would also reform the federal government’s area median income rules and increase the affordability of housing in gentrifying BIPOC communities.
In Chelsea and Everett, we worked with resident-led, community-based organizations during 2018-2019 to co-design the Greater Boston Anti-Displacement Toolkit. The toolkit, available in Spanish and English, includes activities, how-to guides, facilitation plans, and resources that organizers and residents can use to fight displacement.
INCLUSIVE REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM POST-CONFLICT: TEJIENDO REGION IN COLOMBIA’S PACIFIC REGION
Our work in the “Tejiendo Region” in Colombia is advancing an equitable and inclusive development agenda. The Colombian Pacific is a region of contrasting wealth and poverty. It is one of the most diverse areas in the world, with extraordinary natural, human and cultural resources. Yet, the socio-economic reality for its Afro and Indigenous communities is characterized by extreme poverty, lack of access to basic services, an extractive development model that damages the natural environment and reproduces inequality, and structural racism. These conditions pose a barrier to inclusion and equitable development.
To help advance more inclusive development models in the region, since 2014 CoLab has worked with networks of Afro and Indigenous leaders to co-create knowledge, support collective leadership development, and build capacities for community innovation. In 2018-2019, we co-created Territorial Innovation Labs with our partner organizations in Quibdó and Buenaventura (Fundación Pro y Paz, Fundación Ilewa, Fundación Chocarte, Consejo comunitario de San Cipriano, Fundación su Casa Teatro, and Fundación Mareia), that aim to prototype alternatives to the extractive development model in the region and strengthen peacebuilding capacities. Through a series of twelve monthly workshops with youth and community leaders, the Labs created space for participants to discuss, reflect, imagine, and map emerging alternatives for territorial development in the region. The Labs also supported the creation of alternative, sustainable economic enterprises, including eco- and community tourism, youth cultural engagement, and robotics.
In 2020, we focused on re-defining our “Weaving the Region” strategy. Through this platform, we engage with leaders, academia, grassroot organizations, and civic movements in the region to co-create responses to structural violence that advance self-determination and economic democracy. We launched a new initiative to map existing efforts and prototype community-based collective protection mechanisms, and we continued to support the work of civic movements in Buenaventura and Quibdó by building their planning capacity, strengthening their relationships, and increasing their agency to influence territorial development.
