Why the attack on the NRP Model?

While CURA does argue for additional funding for neighborhood organizations in those communities, achieving true equity requires more than just increased funding.

But why did CURA need to begin their process with an extensive attack on NRP?

CURA has said in no uncertain terms that CPP allocations were more equitable than NRP allocations, and this was a demonstration of institutional racism. But CURA has not provided any data or explained the methodology to demonstrate how they came to this conclusion. We believe we have demonstrated the actual data shows that there is no basis for CURA's claim, and that it is based more on institutional bias, rather than actual data.

The NRP model was founded on the idea of a true and empowering equity model. City leadership in the 1980s recognized that the city was in a state of crisis, and stated their intentions to engage residents, through neighborhood organizations, in a truly empowering, resident-driven process. The underlying assumption was that the community was a rich source of assets and skills that could be entrusted to make decisions for their community.

Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) contrasted this Asset Based Community Development model with the typical approach of government and foundations that perceive communities not as a collection of assets and skills, but as a collection of needs and problems (pp. 1-3), and it requires outside experts to fix because the community is unable to fix itself without outside intervention.

The language used by NCR over the last year, and by CURA most recently, reflects their deep-seated commitment to the deficit-based model of the community. Their language and treatment of participants in this process reflects their fundamental belief that the community is broken and dysfunctional, and they alone, as the sole experts, can fix it. The attack on NRP is not just an attack on the NRP itself, but an attack on the idea that the community can have a legitimate role in civic governance and participation.

The practices used by the City and CURA in the process since 2018 also speak volumes. The behavior they are modeling is not one of true collaboration, but rather of an expert-driven (rather than resident-led) process, with little more than community involvement. This demonstrates a fundamental mistrust of the community by two powerful bureaucratic institutions that have long histories of expert-driven practices.

The City Council publicly ordered a resident-led process based on Collaboration, and CURA violated that promise. This has created divisions in the community, broken trust, and likely will damage stakeholder relations for the City far into the future.

The impact of this cannot be understated,

Stuart (2017) notes that “because of the high level of participation, [Collaboration] is particularly useful for controversial issues and complex problems. There can be risks involved in processes at this level. If the promise is seen as being broken (e.g., if members of a community cannot agree of ways forward, or if some sections of the community feel their views were not taken into account), trust can be broken and future relationships with key stakeholders can be significantly damaged.”

The real strength of NRP was that it worked directly with neighborhood residents to design programs that met the needs of those communities. Most NRP programs were not off-the-shelf programs represented by the CEE home-loan programs CURA criticizes. While NRP was a complex program, that was precisely what was needed to provide programs designed by residents to meet the unique needs of their communities. This is precisely the definition of “equity.”

Is achieving equity simply a matter of providing more funding to neighborhood organizations? If those funds are tied to silencing critics of self-appointed experts at the City, than one must wonder if that really achieves equity.

Unfortunately, CURA has not provided any recommendations regarding what changes should be made at the City itself to better support true community engagement and empowerment of residents, particularly in lower-income and more diverse neighborhoods. CURA’s absolute silence on this issue also speaks volumes.