Putting Low-Income Youth in Charge
At the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in the early 1970s, our projects started in our own community of Adams Morgan in Washington, DC. Our first foray was involvement with the Neighborhood Planning Councils (NPCs), elected youth organizations that represented a unique local institution formed immediately after the 1968 riots in DC following the assassination of Martin Luther King. As political scientist Andrew Hacker pointed out, there are therapeutic effects of violence, and the funding thrown at youth and communities after urban uprisings was one manifestation. But instead of general funding dispersed through the city bureaucracy, one federal bureaucrat came up with the novel idea of giving low-income youth resources to plan and implement their own ideas and projects in their own neighborhoods.
The program allocated $2 million annually. The city was divided into 20 neighborhoods, with funding for programs based on the number of low-income youth aged 13 to 21 in each Neighborhood Planning Council. All decisions were made by those elected in each community.
We were impressed with the ability of low-income young people to plan, implement, and evaluate the programs that emerged: training, recreation, small enterprises. Working with the NPCs informed and guided our work with low-income communities throughout the country over the next decades.
Getting involved meant standing for election at the community level.
Two Remarkable Leaders
We met Charlotte Filmore and Walter Pierce, two community organizers of remarkable skill and charisma. When I met Mrs. Filmore, she was already in her 70s, yet she ran a robust program providing combined early education and day care for working class families. The Filmore Early Learning Center was located in the heart of the community at the intersection of Ontario Road and Ontario Place. She fed children breakfast, lunch, and dinner as needed by the families. There were teachers to impart fundamental learning skills. Fees were affordable to these families who saw that their children were safe and gaining important skills.
Walter Pierce worked closely with Mrs. Filmore. He was young, smart, a Navy veteran, and a superior athlete. Tennis was his best sport. He founded the remarkable Ghetto Invitational Tournament, which attracted high school teams to play in these events from as far away as Richmond, VA and Philadelphia, PA. The Tournament was established for one purpose: to showcase talented local high school basketball players who were not elite players scouted by the universities. By showcasing the less elite but nonetheless talented players who would not have had a shot at college, Walter helped scores if not hundreds of young players get scholarships to colleges.
As the saying goes, basketball may have started in a town in Massachusetts, but it grew up in Washington, DC in the 1960s and 1970s. Basketball carried the heartbeat of the city. Walter, the Ontario Lakers, and the Ghetto Invitational Tournament were at the center of this community spirit and energy. The games were played in local high school gyms to crowds of enthusiastic fans and families.
Walter was an aggressive community activist, articulate, loud when he had to be, but always ready to negotiate. His greatest achievement was Community Park West, a three-acre undeveloped site in the heart of Adams Morgan. The land belonged to the federal government, and the city and developers had their hearts and bank accounts set on the land. Walter had other ideas. No one knows how he did it, but he got meetings with the key members of the House District Committee, racists through and through. Yet Walter charmed them, and over a year of talks he got the Committee to approve a land cession to the city if the city would use the land for a community park. We were thrilled and flabbergasted at the same time.
Immediately, ILSR got involved in the planning of the park with strong guidance from Mrs. Filmore and Walter. We had just hired two talented urban agriculturists, Tessa Huxley and Tom Fox. They oversaw a park planning process with community input through planning charrettes in which community members moved pieces around the planning boards to see how a basketball court, open field, and community garden would fit together. The result was a fully operational urban playground for residents. Community Park West was aptly renamed Walter Pierce Park after Walter passed away.
Walter’s tactics were bold, confrontational, and often misunderstood. He painted a large sign on the side of the Sorrento apartment building, which faced south and was visible to all who came up the hill on 18th Street from downtown into the neighborhood. It read: Whitey Stay Out. But it was not a call for race war or class war. It was a call for compromise. He supported our efforts to create good jobs for residents and to produce and distribute food to avoid chain store restaurants which extract wealth from the community. He appreciated the notion from Karl Hess, our anarchist and libertarian friend and neighbor, to divert the money residents spent on cigarettes so people could buy where they live and prevent the onslaught of gentrification.
ILSR focused on the NPCs because this was the only source of money available for community projects designed for and by community members. As such, the distribution of annual funds was closely watched. A small amount of funding through the NPC could leverage additional funds.
How the System Worked
The process required active participation of adults and youth in the community. To be elected to be on the board of a local NPC you had to run for office. That meant that young people had to prepare a resume and written statement explaining why they should be elected and describing the program that they wanted to implement. Adults and youth had to address public meetings before the vote. Once elected, NPC officers reviewed plans for programs in the community and determined which would get funded. Decision-making was difficult and hotly contested.
Mrs. Filmore, chair of the NPC in Adams Morgan, was a strong and astute leader. In anticipation of any spontaneous or organized disturbances over the distribution of money, she would have a police presence at the meeting to assure order. Then she laid down the rules: every proposal that was properly presented had to be funded. This included Black-run groups such as the Lakers and newly formed Latino groups. In the 1970s and 1980s Adams Morgan was the destination for hundreds of refugee families fleeing from troubled times in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries. The now powerful and robust Latin American Youth Center, which continues to serve Latino youth, was born through funding from the NPCs, giving power and authority to youth.
Remarkable programs and enterprises were formed. These included a recycling drop-off center that earned $10,000 annually for the community through sales of dropped-off newspapers and aluminum cans sold to ABC Salvage, the city’s last remaining scrap yard. This company also donated funds for renting shipping containers. Mayor Washington was an enthusiastic supporter, and the recycling drop-off center was allowed to use city land.
The NPCs served as grooming grounds for future DC Council Members, businesspeople, and professionals in many fields. The NPCs used all the abundant local resources in the community. Mrs. Ellis, a retired seamstress, taught young people. The NPC purchased three new sewing machines to augment her older machines so that more training could happen. One NPC started a shoe repair enterprise based on the experience of a retired tradesman.
By giving power and authority to youth, the NPCs surpassed the hopes of their innovators. They taught young people how to run meetings, how to plan and finance projects, and how to evaluate projects. Elected NPC youth members would evaluate each project that was funded. They conducted surprise visits to project sites during times of operation to make sure that the program was doing what it was funded to accomplish.
The Zero Waste Legacy
Regrettably, the NPC experiment was never replicated. The Barry Administration, which preferred to use the funding for the Marion Barry Youth Program, abandoned the NPCs. Of the many great things Barry did for the people of Washington, DC, ending the NPCs out of fear of independent youth activists was most regrettable.
The NPCs and the training we got from working with the youth of Adams Morgan informed our future work when we would be working with local minority organizations and activists across the US. We learned to bring resources and share resources so that community members would be paid to work with us as we were being paid by grants or donations. We also paid strict attention to the communities’ agenda and committed for the long term.
The focus on youth led to a major project in Baltimore when we developed a Zero Waste Plan under the direction of Asian, Black, and Latino youth from Curtis Bay and Brooklyn communities suffering from intense industrial pollution in South Baltimore. Their experience informed the research and writing of the Baltimore Fair Development Zero Waste Plan for Baltimore. This work exemplified the Zero Waste principle that communities must take responsibility for resource management decisions, with all sectors of the community engaged in the movement toward sustainability. The NPC model had taught us that when you give young people real power and real resources, they rise to the challenge and create solutions that professional planners and bureaucrats would never imagine. That lesson continues to guide our work in building Zero Waste communities where decisions are made by those most affected by them.