OPINION:
Looking toward a new year, our challenges are many. Homicide and crime, especially in our urban centers, remain too high. Another COVID-19 variant is raging, putting massive stress on our health care system. Youth depression and suicide continue to soar, afflicting the wealthy even more than the poor. Financial poverty is technically down, but underlying issues are likely masked by massive COVID-19 related federal spending set to expire this year. Meanwhile, inflation is squeezing family budgets.
While these headlines paint a picture of gloom for 2022, every day, I learn of stories of redemption, renewal and transformation in local communities that often don’t make news. We like to analyze problems on a national scale, but the most effective solutions are almost always local.
Despite our well-documented polarization, Americans remain generous, open-hearted people. Support for nonprofits increased at the start of the pandemic. If this trend continues into 2022, we can do much to empower struggling communities to solve their problems.
While government programs to help the poor tend to be inefficient and incentivize dependency, one study of just 70 nonprofit organizations in the U.S. found that they generated $14 billion in benefits for their communities over five years. The average return on every dollar donated to these nonprofits was between $89 and $157.
The details of the problems we face vary not just state to state and city to city, but block to block. And no one understands the problems of a particular block better than the people who live there. To effectively educate children, mentor troubled youth, shelter the homeless, and feed and care for the sick, addicted, abused or wounded requires neighborhood-specific knowledge more than professional expertise.
For 40 years, the Woodson Center has demonstrated that transformation, renewal and redemption can bear fruit in even the most challenging environments. Our Voices of Black Mothers United initiative launched a year ago and brought together mothers of fallen children and community partners to heal, strengthen and make communities safe. These powerful women are working together to support intervention and sensible police reform, and they pushed back against the deadly Defund The Police movement.
In the middle of an ongoing pandemic and homicide wave, they expanded to more than 20 states to work in the areas of family advocacy, community intervention and positive policing.
Since 1998, we have invested more than $50 million into our Community Affiliate Network affiliate program, a group of over 500 local nonprofits. We do this by distributing grants for violence prevention, addiction recovery, youth mentorship, neighborhood revitalization and other projects to catalyze upward mobility.
In all, we awarded 208 grants in 2020-2021, the most in our 30-year history. Our grassroots affiliates touched about 44,000 lives in all. We heard daily testimonies of hope from across the nation through their work. Consistently, they remind us that the solutions can be found in the same zip code as the problem.
For example, Ron Anderson leads a youth mentoring and leadership development nonprofit in Louisiana called Project Reclaim. This past year, we partnered with him through our grant program because we’ve seen that investment in at-risk youth on the front end can prevent dangerous and irresponsible behavior later on. Ron has demonstrated that he could serve one youth for a little over $1,000 annually. Compare that to the whopping $154,760 price tag on a year of incarceration in Louisiana for the same child.
Not only is the outcome for the child better with Project Reclaim’s help, but the program is also freeing up hundreds of thousands annually that might be spent on incarceration to go to other community investments.
Project Reclaim served a total of 120 youth in 2021, all of whom were classified as “at-risk.” So far, all of them have remained in school. None have gotten involved in juvenile court or teen pregnancy. We can’t wait to watch them be promoted to the next grade.
One Project Reclaim participant, Kristin, stands out to me. In eighth grade, she stole her mother’s car to take a joyride with friends. Her mother found out about Project Reclaim through juvenile court personnel, and it’s changed both of their lives.
Two years after their first Project Reclaim program, Kristin and her mother run a small business together, preparing and delivering home-cooked meals. Kristin is a straight-A student. She’s a leader and feels she has a family outside of the family with Project Reclaim. We hope and strive for this outcome with every youth we meet who needs help.
Some of our leaders leverage their grants to build momentum and scale up their programs. That’s what the East River Family Strengthening Collaborative in Washington did. It has been operating in the primarily low-income Ward 7 part of D.C. since 1996. Its grant kickstarted the work it needed to do to expand its community services to meet the core needs of the people facing extreme poverty, drug addiction and violence.
These are just a few examples of the programs we’ve seen flourish this year. Anyone can hand out backpacks or turkeys, but lasting transformation comes from authentic human connections built on trust. That trust — not a perfectly designed brochure or a market-tested mission statement — is what makes real change possible.
In 2022, I hope that Americans will take a break from the doom and gloom of national news and the endless national policy discussions that speak in abstractions and ignore living, breathing human beings.
This year, let’s invest in problem-solvers who understand the problems because they’ve personally experienced them. Let’s invest on the block level. Give neighborhood leaders the support they need to flourish, and we’ll all reap dividends.
• Bob Woodson is the founder and president of The Woodson Center and the author of “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.”
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