Maggie DeSantis has worked in community development in Detroit for over 40 years. She is the founder of the Warren Conner Development Corporation, known today as Eastside Community Network, which she led from 1984 to 2016. In this role, and through her organizing work with Building the Engine of Community Development in Detroit and consulting work for Community Development Advocates of Detroit, she has nurtured many of Detroit’s nonprofit leaders.
This is a companion piece to another story on a cross-city collaborative for youth learning and working in the community development space.
Kenyetta Campbell from Cody Rouge Community Action Alliance said that you were the brainchild behind the multi-agency, cross-city Youth in Community Development Collaborative project. How did the collaboration begin?
When Kenyatta says I was the brainchild, she meant only to the extent that this collaborative emerged from the
Building the Engine of Community Development in Detroit (BECDD) process. I conceived the BECDD concept and its elements. However, the work of building out each element was truly collaborative. The group decided on the research we needed to conduct and on creating a competency-based framework. My job was to tease out the ideas in an orderly way, figure out the next steps, and convene each task force meeting so that we were always moving forward.
What is BECDD, and how did it shape this collaboration?
Building the Engine was something I had been thinking about for years. I didn't have a name for it, but I'd been thinking about the importance of a community development system for quite a long time. I used the last couple of years of my tenure at Eastside Community Network to put a little meat on those bones.
At the time, what I thought and what a steering committee and various task forces verified was what we call the “Seven System Elements” of a community development system for Detroit.
The initiative
brought together stakeholders from grassroots organizations, community development organizations, and their partners in government, philanthropy, academia, social justice, civic, and business sectors. The process spanned five years, from 2016 to 2021. Community Development Advocates of Detroit (CDAD), our core partner, has been the container for the leadership pipeline work since then, and it contracts with me as a consultant to facilitate the plan.
I see number six of the system elements is an education and leadership pipeline. What’s the significance of this in Detroit’s community development sector?
Every profession—whether it's journalism, accounting, law, or whatever—finds a way to develop, mentor, and train young people so that as you grow up and out, and retire, there's a bench somewhere. Sometimes it's formal, and sometimes it's not. In Detroit, we hadn't given much deliberate thought to what that really means. In other places, many people who began their careers at a community development organization early on have since expanded into various sectors. They worked in government, philanthropy, business, education, and research.
This [community development] is an unusual career because you can apply the knowledge, experience, skills, and values that you've started to hone in a neighborhood and bring them into other sectors. What we saw in Detroit was that movement and penetration into the other allied sectors were not happening.
Why wasn’t this happening in Detroit?
The difference is that in other cities, where people were moving through the various sectors, community development was respected as a profession by philanthropy, government, and academia. In Detroit, community development was more like shoelaces, string, and Scotch Tape. Some neighborhoods had it, some didn’t. The government didn't understand it or respect it. Philanthropy sometimes funded it, and sometimes didn't. It was a haphazard situation.
Over the almost 10 years we have been working on this system, it has undergone significant changes, and I believe this is a result of the work we did on the leadership pipeline and other system elements. Other sectors are realizing there are talented people here. A running joke now is that our CDO professionals are getting stolen. It’s what we wanted, so we can’t complain, but now we have to have the pipeline.
How did these four organizations end up leading the pipeline collaborative?
I remember well the [BECDD] meeting we held; there had to be 100 constituents in the room, and we were discussing our next steps. I had done a lot of work ahead of time to ensure that different organizations were ready to raise their hands to take one or more of the element projects. But there was no single entity willing to take the lead in the leadership pipeline.
We know how important it is. You can't have a community development system without a bench of people who are being prepared. We posed the question, and four organizations raised their hands. They were the four organizations leading the Youth in Community Development Collaborative: Eastside Community Network, Cody Rouge Community Action Alliance, Congress of Communities, and Urban Neighborhood Initiatives. And every single one of them had a serious track record in youth development.
What kind of research did the group do for this element?
The first thing was to search around the country to see if there was anything similar to a leadership or career pathway for community development elsewhere. We engaged with the
Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), and the response was "no." We're going to have to invent something, which is good news and bad news. Good that the task force had a blank slate on which to create a custom framework for the city, but there were also no guidelines to follow and no examples of lessons learned.
In creating the competency framework for Detroit, the group's commitment was to focus on People of Color, because that's Detroit. And frankly, up to that point, the majority of the CDOs had white men running them. And that's not Detroit, unless you want to talk the corporate side.
What else did the collaborative focus on in their competency-based framework?
We spent a lot of time on how a person could move through and prepare to work in community development. What kind of skills, what kind of experience, what kind of knowledge, what kind of values? Those four things were really important, and we developed that framework from the perspective of an entry-level professional, a mid-level professional, and a senior professional.
We identified four types of people we wanted to help prepare for this work: existing residents who are actively volunteering in their neighborhoods; young people, which is where the Youth In Community Development Collaborative grew; career changers, meaning people who work in fields associated with community development that might want to jump to the other side; and young people coming out of college looking for what they want to do with their lives.
We also concluded that community development could be a lifelong career, beginning with learning about it at a very young age. Many of the people who worked on this, including myself, have stories about how we first became excited about working in neighborhoods at a very young age. For me, it was eight years old. I didn't know what to call it. I just knew I wanted to do it. Many people had the same story. We decided to start by exposing kids as young as middle school and then continuing through.
How has the collaborative been working over the past five years?
We spent a year and a half developing this original community development curriculum, specifically for students ages 14 through high school. And it was essentially the four organizations taking on pieces of work they were already doing with young people in their respective communities.
It has undergone several iterations, and we've been testing it at three high schools and a couple of middle schools since 2020 to learn from the experience. I'm betting that it will undergo further changes, as it's intended to be a living document. Each organization delivers the curriculum in its own way, but they're all teaching the curriculum they helped to create.
The collaborative made an important and, I think, brilliant decision, which is what it’s implementing now: to leverage a partnership with
Grow Detroit's Young Talent (GDYT) to find other CDOs willing to deliver the curriculum along with the four lead CDOs in a setting where the young people are paid and working 20 hours a week.
What sparked your interest in community development when you were eight years old?
I was raised staunchly and strictly Catholic in northeast Detroit, in a Polish neighborhood. I come from an Italian family, but the neighborhood was all white. One Sunday, my family, including my eight siblings and parents, was at Mass, and the pastor stood up to pitch a special collection. He actually said from the pulpit, ‘Don't worry, this money will not go to the coloreds.’”
I can still vividly remember how I felt sitting in that pew. It was the 1950s, so there were no groans or gasps, just my eight-year-old self gasping. It fueled a fever in me that something was wrong with that, and I wanted to make a difference. And for me, it translated to making a difference in my city. My professional career in Detroit began at New Detroit, which launched me into a position that allowed me to help create the Warren Conner Development Coalition, of which I'm the founding executive director. The rest is history.
What can the community development leadership pipeline do for our city in terms of growing this interest and passion in young people?
I think it will save our city. Community development has been present in Detroit since the 1980s, although it has not always been led by people who live in the city. That's changing now, but very often it's not people who have risen from the neighborhood and truly understand it. It'll save our city long term and take us way past, "Aren't downtown and midtown great?" It'll take us into brand new territory.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Resilient Neighborhoods is a reporting and engagement series that examines how Detroit residents and community development organizations are working together to strengthen local neighborhoods. It's made possible with funding from the Kresge Foundation.