Business

Listening to the heart of community

Before most people had even heard of tax breaks in Opportunity Zones, Lift Orlando was already breaking ground on a project designed to rebuild the dilapidated-but-beloved neighborhoods west of downtown Orlando, partnering with lifelong residents like Tangia Smikle.

Tangia Smikle (pictured middle), liaison from the Lake Lorna Doone neighborhood and board member of West Lakes Partnership

Investing in the future of this community – located 15 miles from Disney World, a mile from downtown Orlando, and in the shadow of a newly refurbished stadium – didn’t start with an apartment complex (though that and more would come). It started with working cooperatively and gathering a team. And it meant, first, taking the time to learn about the area’s unique and rich history.

In the 1940s and ’50s, when the homes in these neighborhoods west of Orlando were built, it was a place of incredible hope for Black families, a community built by African Americans for African Americans. “It was full of college-educated families of color, highly accomplished families,” says Eddy Moratin, Lift Orlando’s president. But over time, “discriminatory policies, unjust business practices, and absentee slumlords” brought the neighborhood down. Some families remained committed to staying in the neighborhood; many others moved out.

Even as Orlando prospered, these neighborhoods did not experience the same, and the “unpleasant history of segregation and urban policy took its toll,” Eddy says. “Many decisions played a role in orchestrating to choke off these communities from opportunity.”

“But it’s super enlightening,” he says.  And the complex history helped Lift Orlando realize how seriously they had to take strategizing to solve the complex issues of the neighborhoods.

Partnerships

They began by partnering with the Polis Institute, an organization that specializes in research and training for revitalizing urban neighborhoods and by gathering a “street team” of residents who became their researchers and organizers. After 30,000 hours, they’d completed the largest urban neighborhood survey ever conducted in the city – with more than 1,500 door-to-door interviews and dozens of community gatherings. This unique approach to establishing channels of communication helped them begin to identify the needs and desires of the community, and it still guides their work now.

Key to their plan is the West Lakes Partnership, which represents the five neighborhoods of the community, each one with a liaison to the project. With the help of these leaders and the partnership, members of the community are not just recipients of donors’ and organizers’ good work. They are resident leaders, community organizers, leaders themselves, and volunteers.

“We just needed a big brother to give us a helping hand, but not a handout,” says Tangia Smikle, liaison from the Lake Lorna Doone neighborhood and board member of West Lakes Partnership.

Eddy Moratin, executive director of Lift Orlando

According to Lift Orlando, these lifelong residents are the real experts, those who have run mom-and-pop businesses, the families who have called the neighborhood home for generations. They know the heritage that turns a few city blocks into a home. They know the hopes and dreams harbored by their friends and neighbors. They know the true potential of a place and the people who call it home.

Lifelong residents are the real experts…. They know the heritage that turns a few city blocks into a home. They know the hopes and dreams harbored by their friends and neighbors

“Every neighborhood has its experts,” Eddy says, but “when it comes to building community, sometimes the people you think are the experts aren’t the actual experts. The developers. The politicians. The engineers who come in from the outside. They may have the data, but that doesn’t mean they understand how to really make a difference.”

Wise counsel

What outside experts did bring to the partnership, though, was that much-needed strategy and technical expertise. Leaders of Lift Orlando sought advice from Purpose Built Communities, an organization that had revitalized Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood. Their model is designed to break cycles of generational poverty and guide neighborhood revitalization by creating pathways out of poverty for the lowest-income residents, and building strong, economically diverse communities.

Continuous engagement with the community helped Lift Orlando recognize which of the needs they had identified were right on target. One of the firsts on everybody’s lists was replacing the distressed housing in the community with high-quality, mixed-income-housing.

“If you want to avoid just becoming a collection of programs and actually want to transform a community, your first priority needs to be real estate, real estate, real estate,” says Greg Giornelli, former CEO of Purpose Built Communities and Founder of Purpose Built Schools. If you can’t change the bricks and mortar, you’ll never provide a reason for the families who might be upwardly mobile to want to stay in the neighborhood.

“Real estate is not a silver bullet,” Eddy says. Real-estate-only projects can lead to the worst kinds of gentrification. But a holistic approach makes housing “a very important cornerstone” in the building of a community that provides not just housing, but the wrap-around services and holistic community support necessary for families to thrive.

Infrastructure

The neighbors named the apartment complex Pendana, which means “to love one another” in Swahili. And the community is built around this idea. Complete with playgrounds, parks, a swimming pool, walking paths, and courtyards, there is plenty of space to gather. But there were other needs.

“We wanted to rebuild the infrastructure,” Eddy says. When it was stronger, there were schools, doctors, and grocers in the neighborhood. Their holistic approach involved plans to bring in these community-strengthening institutions. The local elementary school is expanding to become a K-8. A city park has already been completed.

Among the highest priorities in a purpose-built community is a “cradle-to-career pipeline,” Eddy says. This meant they also needed a preschool. Lift partnered with Primrose Schools and Advent Health, along with $12.75 million of funding from a family foundation to design a premium early learning center. It’s the only Primrose School in the nation with a private nutritionist preparing fresh meals daily and a physician’s assistant onsite for families to visit if they’re worried about bringing a sick child to school or missing a day of work for the same reason. All this will be offered to families of all income levels, on a sliding scale for payment.

Collaboration and strategy

Pendana Phase I has been awarded four distinguished housing industry awards, including the National Apartment Association’s Excellence Award for Affordable Housing.

Next was the Washington Shores Village and Orange Manor Apartments, once reputed to be the worst apartments in Orlando. These communities had been in decline for decades and were shut down in 2014, displacing many who had lived there for years. In place of the old apartments, Lift is building 320 units of high-quality, mixed-income housing, including 120 affordable residences designed especially for seniors 62 and older.

Pendana Senior Residences at West Lakes and a Boys and Girls Club were completed in 2021. And the capstone project, The Heart of West Lakes Wellness Center, followed. The 30,000-square-foot center provides the community with convenient access to holistic health, financial, and lifestyle services (cafe, community meeting rooms, fitness center, and more), all under one roof. The state-of-the-art $13.5M facility makes history as the first-ever, large-scale collaboration between three of Florida’s largest healthcare organizations.

In total, more than $100 million in capital improvements have helped these neighborhoods catch up from decades of public and private divestments. “It’s already paying off in dramatic dividends,” Eddy says.

Those “dramatic dividends” are measurable. Since the improvements began, West Lakes has seen per-capita income increase by approximately $10,000. Childhood poverty in the area decreased from 54.8% to 19.1%, and more than 400 jobs have been created.

All of this work has been accomplished through collaboration among residents and donors, businesses and the city. And it has required that kind of strategic thinking that Lift sought out. Eddy says he remembers hearing mentor and friend, Robert Lupton, founder of Focused Community Strategies, say, “The missionaries of the future will be real estate developers.” He means those Christians who, for maybe a long time, haven’t felt like their skill sets had anything to do with their faith. “But those are God-given skills,” Eddy says. “And when it comes to solving complex problems, those are the very skills we need.”

The missionaries of the future will be real estate developers.

Robert Lupton, founder of Focused Community Strategies

Mercy or justice?

Besides real estate developers, bankers and downtown employers said they also needed a strategy to create long-term financial sustainability and to continue acquiring land in order to get ahead of the inevitable wave of gentrification their success would attract. So they started their own social impact investment fund for those with a heart for what they were doing who wanted to invest.

“The motivation behind that was to not avoid being squeezed out of community-serving opportunities by speculators and to gather people who really wanted to be involved in advancing the wellbeing of the community,” Eddy says. It was about mobilizing property for the benefit of the neighborhood.

The LIFT Orlando Impact Investment Fund aims to be a catalyst for socioeconomic benefit with the potential for modest financial gain. The impact fund has allowed them to raise almost $10 million of private capital to accelerate projects in healthcare, education, and job creation.

Many strategic thinkers have been involved in Lift’s planning, and it’s all flowed together, not effortlessly, but cohesively. Individual goals are working together to build a strong and flourishing community.

Eddy says it’s not enough to do good. “You have to do good strategically and sustainably. It’s more the work of justice than mercy, because mercy can just leave people where they are.”

Leaving people where they are, in poverty, doesn’t build up a community. Allowing them to share in decision-making and proudly live in a place they’ve called home for years definitely does.

Throughout NCF’s nationwide network, givers and community leaders are sparking incredible movements of generosity just like this. If you want to make a bigger impact where you live, alongside like-minded givers, connect with your local NCF team today.

Contact your local NCF team

Photos: Lift Orlando

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