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April 30, 2004
"Richard Townsell, Lawndale Christian Development Corp."
Welcome to this online interview with Richard Townsell, Excecutive Director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corp. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, April 30. You may ask a question in advance by clicking on the "Submit a Question" button. Due to time constraints, not all questions will be answered. You may need to refresh your screen during the interview to read the most recent responses. read background Leadership for a Changing World
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Richard Townsell, Executive Director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation, and a 2003 Leadership for a Changing World awardee.
Richard, can you tell us how you got involved in social justice work?
Richard Townsell
I came to be involved in Lawndale Christian Development Corporation by being involved in the church. The church is 26 years old. I’ve been involved 24 of those 26 years. Prior to that I was born in the neighborhood, in a single parent home, in poverty, and many of the issues that affect our community now affected it then. And so it’s kind of out of a personal experience that really drives an awful lot of my passion for this work as well as my faith and commitment at my church to do social justice work.
I became the first full time director of LCDC in 1992 after teaching public high school and wanting to get outside the classroom and have an impact on the community as opposed to having an impact on 120 kids a year because many of those students brought with them problems and issues we couldn’t solve in the classroom. So I had a passion to get outside the confines of the school to make more systemic changes.
When I first got the job I was a little naïve. I was 28 and thought I could change the world. I didn’t understand community organizing. We really were doing more community development and social services work. We joined this campaign to push Mayor Daley to make a 10-year commitment to affordable housing and that’s when I met some of the first organizers and really saw that housing work should be kind of married with community organizing and not separate.
washington, dc
Do you find it necessary to live in the same community that you are working with?
Richard Townsell
I don’t think it’s necessary to live in the neighborhood. I think living in the neighborhood in which you do the work gives you an advantage with everyday residence and credibility. You see the problems firsthand as opposed to hearing about them, and those problems don’t go away when you drive home. They become, you know, your passion because it’s part of your self-interest to deal with them. I think particularly when you’re trying to create a community plan because people want to know why you’re interested and why you care. When you live in the neighborhood it impacts me, it impacts my family, so I want the same thing as everybody here wants. And the other advantage is you build relationships in informal settings as well, in the grocery store, in the restaurants, in the parks, and so people see you outside of your title.
Winston-Salem, NC
What were the racial dynamics like as a "suburban" schoolteacher? In what ways did that experience prepare you for your work?
Richard Townsell
I often saw the disparities between suburban schools I taught at and the local high school I taught at when I initially got out of college. For example, in 1987, we were still using a mimeograph machine to run off copies. In the suburban school system there were several heavy-duty copiers in the school that I could just go make copies. There was one copier in the entire school in the city and it was in the principal’s office. I was a coach and so the ball fields and the wrestling room and the track, it rivaled what I had at Northwestern when I was in college. In the inner city, you’d be lucky to have footballs let alone a football field of that magnitude. So it angered me to see how little the city schools were getting, how low the expectations were. So just the small things that you notice that just propelled me to come back to my neighborhood and say it didn’t need to be this way. I also saw in the suburban schools, in the honors and AP classes, how high the expectations were for those students. I didn’t have the same sense in the city schools.
Berkeley, CA
You became director of LCDC at just 28--what advice do you have for young community leaders? What are the biggest challenges to taking the lead so early on?
Richard Townsell
I think that young leaders need to understand that a community development organization is a business and they have to run it like a business. They have to understand accounting. They’ve got to understand fund-raising, marketing, personnel issues, and personnel law. I mean, they have to understand how to evaluate talent and reward talent. Many of things that you would need to run a successful small business or a medium business are what you would need to run a successful community development organization. If it’s going to sustainable for the long haul that’s what you need to have.
In addition, you have to find talent that’s different than you are and with different skills. Some people surround themselves with others just like them and good leaders surround themselves with people that disagree with them and they’re comfortable with that. I mean, they disagree with them from time to time, but they’re comfortable enough with who they are that they can surround themselves with people who don’t have hero worship for them. They’ve got to spend time, a lot of time, doing what we call relational meetings, one-on-ones, face-to-face, building relationships on the inside and outside of their community. There’s not a lot of that kind of work going on. People tend to stick with building their institution, but they don’t build the relationships they need outside of their institution.
Forest Hill, TX
Do you find it's easier to engage community members first through religion or through community action? To what extent does church involvement and community involvement build on each other in your community?
Richard Townsell
I would say that the church is perhaps the only institution in the black community that has the respect and the moral voice and authority to engage in community action in any kind of sustainable way. So I would dare say my bias is to work with the church institutions first and to engage others as well. My bias is we always engage the church first. Many of the issues and problems that exist in the neighborhood the church is already working on in the lives of their parishioners, whether it’s drug problems or schools, welfare reform, whatever it is. The challenge is getting them organized to work together and we’ve been pretty good at doing that.
Nashville, TN
What are some challenges to working in coalition with different religious groups? Do you think they are unique challenges, or inherent in any coalition?
Richard Townsell
One of the challenges working with religious groups is if it’s kind of multi-faith groups where you work with Muslims and Catholics and African-American Protestants and white Protestants, it’s just doctrinal issues or at times people trying to proselytize others, so it really depends on the issues that we’re working on. Sometimes that becomes a barrier, a doctrine or faith issues. Another is class. You may have a more middle class church working with a working class or poorer church and getting the middle class church to see, for example, the homes that we’re building for working families, they may want a house that’s more expensive. Some may want to build a $250,000 house and think that that’s fine for this neighborhood, but most people couldn’t afford a $125,000 house, so trying to get them to understand the class issues. Sometimes it’s sides of town where westside churches don’t work with southside churches. Sometimes they’re in competition for members and so it takes a very skilled organizer to be able to manage all of those dynamics. Sometimes you have larger churches that have big staff and they’re doing a lot of stuff on their own, and trying to get the pastor to pay attention to some kind of social justice issue becomes difficult because they’re involved in so many coalitions, the Urban League, the mayor’s calling them, and their denomination. So the big ones get a lot of attention from a lot of folks.
Chicago
You mention that you partner with the Latino community as well. Are there differences or similarities that you see between the needs of the two communities (or other groups in the area)? If so, what are they?
Richard Townsell
I think that there are more similarities than differences between the African-American and the Latino communities. Things we have in common are we want great schools for our children, affordable homes, apartments to live in, safe neighborhoods, quality retail and commercial spaces where we can shop, and affordable health care. Those are all things that most families want.
I think the differences are around specific issues that relate to immigration policy, barriers around language, and tension around who will be the number two minority or number one minority. You see tension around that as Latinos pass African-Americans, there’s tension between the communities. So figuring out how to work together would be in both of our interests.
Kansas City, MO
Your group collaborates with a lot of other people. What is the easiest mistake to make when you get a lot of leaders together in one place?
Richard Townsell
I don’t think there’s one easiest mistake that you can make when you get a lot of leaders in the same room. I’m going to tell you the five that are most common in my experience. The first is not having a pre-meeting with key leaders before the big meeting where collectively you craft the agenda for the meeting so that everyone is clear before they get to the big meeting why they’re there. That’s probably the biggest mistake because of the tyranny of the urgency, no one wants to do that pre-work.
The second killer is not having a timed agenda, so the meeting drags on forever because people are too polite to stop folks when they start giving the I Have a Dream speech. Not having a timed agenda with people who will cut people off and move the meeting is another critical mistake.
The third is being clear on the purpose of the meeting and why exactly we’re gathering and stating that purpose in the meeting. I’ve been to too many meetings where that hasn’t happened and so people leave wondering why they were there and what actually got accomplished.
The fourth mistake is what I call hyper-democracy where we are so afraid of offending anyone we want to please everybody. And so there’s no vote on items and ultimately nothing gets done.
And finally, not having an evaluation at the end of the meeting to make sure that all of the points and turnout goals and drama and everything else that was supposed to take place to evaluate did it happen because in the evaluation is actually where most of the good learning takes place.
Boston, MA
In terms of gentrification, besides buying up more parcels, what are the mechanisms for ensuring affordability into the next generation? Do you build cooperatives, use land trusts? What public policies would help assure that people in communities of color would both see the value of their homes increase, without encouraging gentrification?
Richard Townsell
We do not do land trusts or cooperatives. We believe in using the market to create wealth for families. The same way that others have benefited from capitalism, we want to see our neighbors benefit from it. Our goal is to build at a size and scale and at a level, price points, where working families can afford to buy and create the environment where they choose to stay.
I don’t have a lot of hope, unlike some of my colleagues, for public policy. I believe in building a power base and that power precedes policy and programs. I have a lot more faith in a thousand homeowners deciding what their interests are and making sure they happen than a white paper from the University of Chicago talking about what could or should happen. So our goal is to buy as much of it as we can so that we can have some say over the future of the next generation and to get people to own at whatever level they can today, so that they could benefit from it in the future. We believe managed gentrification is a good thing.
Years ago when I started, we couldn’t get a single family home to appraise for $50,000, and it couldn’t have gotten worse in terms of abandonment and fires being set and all kinds of stuff. Today, those same homes would appraise for $180,000. That is good and bad. It’s good for the homeowner who sells and now has an opportunity to have equity. It could be potentially bad for the next buyer if they don’t have the capital to maintain that home. It’s a mixed bag.
Tacoma, WA
Richard, could you speak a bit about how you integrate your values into how you run your business?
How do you stay grounded as a leader?
Richard Townsell
My values come out of Scripture and the greatest command in the Bible is to love God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength, and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. That is a supreme challenge in our narcissistic and materialistic world and so I believe that we should as leaders be servants and be willing to not take the work too seriously and to view our work as a calling. The things that keep me grounded are: my wife, who does not by any stretch think I am an LCW awardee or anything of that nature, when I’m at home I have to do the dishes and clean up the dog poop like everybody else; my children, who I want them to inherit a different world than we’ve inherited; and my church family, many of which have not had the same benefits I’ve had and are really looking for our neighborhood to return to its former glory. So those things keep me driven and humble and they sustain me.
NY, NY
Your profile quotes you as saying, “Leadership development is about creating space and tension so that people, particularly young leaders, can champion their own ideas and dreams. Building relationships of mutual respect, trust, and accountability is at the heart of my approach.” Can you speak more on how you believe tension can lead to trust?
Richard Townsell
One of my heroes in Brooklyn, New York, is a pastor by the name of Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, and one of his sayings is that “straight talk leads to straight understanding.” And so I take that to say that everyone has an agenda. We need to figure out whether it’s a selfish agenda or an enlightened agenda. And so I believe the job of leaders is to push to figure that question out. And once that stuff’s on the table and we know what our agendas are, we have some trust that we can build on. And as we successfully win some victories together it builds more trust. And so I push a lot of my staff to get clear on why they do what they do and other local residents as well.
San Jose, CA
I see that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was an inspiration for you. Do you have other role models or leadership heroes?
Richard Townsell
I have many heroes that I draw strength and encouragement from, the most important being my mother who died in 1989, and she raised me and my two brothers in public housing after suffering a stroke in which she was paralyzed for the rest of her life. She was my biggest example of perseverance that I’ve ever known. My high school wrestling coach, Ernie Thompson, who was just inducted into the Illinois Wrestling Coaches Hall of Fame was like the father I never knew. My pastor, Wayne Gordon, who became my spiritual father, as well as the Reverend John Perkins from Mississippi, who is the godfather of Christian community development in this country. And finally Stephen Roberson, an organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation, who’s been my mentor and friend as an organizer for almost 10 years. Those are living. Dead would be Malcolm X and Steve Biko.
Leadership for a Changing World
We're almost out of time for today. This will be the last question.
Richard, how do you personally sustain yourself and your staff while working on difficult social problems?
Richard Townsell
There are several ways that I sustain myself and try to model and demand the same for staff, the first being having an active prayer life. The second being exercise. I get up early in the morning and exercise. Third, not being out more than two nights a week in community meetings and those sorts of things, which can go on into the late hours. I work very few weekends. I’m home in time to help my kids with their homework, and I demand the same of everyone else who works for us. You should have a work-life balance.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you again for joining us today for Leadership Talks with Richard Townsell.
For more information:
Richard Townsell
Executive Director
Lawndale Christian Development Corp.
3843 West Ogden Avenue
Chicago, IL 60623
Phone: 773-762-8889
Fax: 773-762-8893
Email: rtownsell@lcdc.net (email down temporarily)
Web: www.lcdc.net
Please join us for the next Leadership Talks.
Richard Townsell
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