cyRev Online Journal

Method

This study is an example of what the African American psychologist Kenneth Clarke called involved observation. (43) In his study of a social action agency in Harlem, New York, he played two roles simultaneously, executive director and researcher. He recruited another social scientist to help him debrief and escape the blinders of his own subjectivity. This is very different from the detachment required of participant observation.

The two authors of this paper are volunteers and board members at the center, involved in planning and implementing programs. We have used our two viewpoints to triangulate towards objectivity. We have also discussed this analysis with staff, volunteers, and other board members.

In addition, we made use of the center's archives, benefiting from cooperation with the center as a whole. The archives include 18 linear feet of papers in files and binders and a number of electronic documents. Part of our work was assembling and inventorying this material for the center: minutes and handouts from board and staff meetings, financial records, day-to-day program records, and program plans and reports. It is testimony to the care taken from the beginning days of the center that staff preserved these records. We also conducted interviews with key participants. In turn, we discussed research findings with board members, staff and volunteers, whose input only helped improve the study.

Historical Narrative

The object of our case study is the W. J. Murchison Community Center, a center which today carries out tutoring, community gardening, support for other community groups, and most of all computer classes and open computer time. The center has 17 PCs and is located at street level on a smaller arterial street in African American central Toledo, Ohio. The community garden is one block away, across from Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. Half of the computers are networked to the Internet. An average of 200 people use the center each month, and more than 170 have user IDs for which they paid $5 annually, $10 for families.

According to the 1990 U.S. census, 70% of households in the surrounding area live at or near federal poverty levels and 70% are female headed. Ninety-seven percent of residents are African-American. The area has lost population over the last 40 years. Many of the mostly wood houses, built around the turn of the century, are boarded up. The city has also torn down abandoned houses. Inhabited houses may be broken down or freshly painted and carefully maintained. Yards may be overgrown with weeds or rich with flowers and trimmed hedges. The community is also dotted with vegetable gardens with greens, tomatoes, and an occasional stand of corn.

Nine churches are located within one half mile, more beyond that radius. These churches serve both community residents and people who live in the generally more affluent and newer African-American communities to the west, many of them with ties to the old community. Hair salons, little stores selling candy, soda, junk food, and beer, and "big box" auto parts stores dominate the local economy. McDonalds is the morning coffee spot for older men in and from the community. The absence of a grocery store has been a political issue for some time.

Interstate 75, a major highway linking the southern and northern United States, slices the Toledo Museum of Art away from the community. The museum's programs, for instance, art class scholarships, are not publicized in the area, although the founder Edward Drummond Libbey, a local glass magnate, stipulated that admission to the museum was to remain always free, and built a wing that has long housed art classes for the general public, classes which many older white Toledoans remember fondly.

In 1998, in a well-publicized move against drug dealing, Toledo's mayor declared martial law on a side street next to the center. The police moved in and set up guard stations limiting people's access to their homes and preventing guests from visiting. This prompted a brief debate. After a few months the city removed the concrete barriers and martial law was lifted. In 2000, the federal government allocated over $4 million to gentrify part of the area, continuing a nationwide pattern of de-population preliminary to a (real or promised) return of the middle class to the central city.

Stage One: Church

Bishop W. J. Murchison is pastor of nearby St. James Baptist Church, which he founded in 1967. A retired construction worker and contractor originally from Georgia, he and his wife Sister Dorothy Murchison live six blocks away from the center. She sings and has for many years directed St. James's youth choir as well as a citywide fellowship choir. She is also known for her grassroots fundraising: gospel concerts, banquets, and especially her "brownies" funds (pennies).

In 1992 crack cocaine swept through the area, snatching up many vulnerable individuals of all ages and settling into buildings that became crack houses. Residents saw people lose their cars, even their houses, after falling prey to crack. For Bishop, who had always emphasized the church's ministry to youth, this recalled Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, especially "A time to plant, and a time to pluck up." He experienced a vision, which was to found a community center. As he puts it, "We were about to lose a generation."

With crack tearing through the families of his own congregation, it was natural to draw together a group of church members to implement his vision. His own niece Deborah Hamilton, saved since her late 20s, was among the group. Bishop also recruited a younger minister Dr. C. E. Reese to administer the effort. Remembering the early days of the center, Sister Murchison references another bible verse, Proverbs 18:29: "Without a vision, the people perish."

In 1993, partly because drug treatment agencies had already set up nearby, the group decided to focus on prevention—agreeing in one early handout, "If the mind is replete with substance of the positive nature, then the need for further stimulus becomes a moot point." Dr. Reese outlined the center's original vision statement: "Awareness ... Education ... Outreach." The center's programs got underway in the basement of St. James Baptist Church.

Programs consisted of counseling, job preparation, and computer skill training. By 1994, there were two donated Wang word processors. When both computers were in use, participants practiced key stroking on spare and unconnected keyboards. In the eyes of Mrs. Hamilton, this was driven by their hunger for education and advancement.

In 1994 Dr. Reese left Toledo, and the board asked Deborah Hamilton to become the executive director. Members recall four reasons: She had a college degree, she knew how to use computers, she had served as secretary of the board, and she was a staunch member of the church.

Guided by Mrs. Hamilton's self-study on organizational development, the board became a fundraising committee. They obtained non-profit status in March 1994, thus moving from under the umbrella of the church to being a distinct organization. In the tradition of the Black church, a series of projects kept bringing money in, several hundred dollars at a time, and the organization always had close to $2,000 saved up. An effort to recruit a grant writer began, and in early 1995 grant writer Ms. Goletha D. C. K. Chestnut volunteered to work with Mrs. Hamilton on two grant proposals for public funding. The first of these was to the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services (ADAS) and the second was to the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program via the City of Toledo.

By February 1995, the board was so encouraged by the programs and the fundraising that when Bishop suggested for a second time that for $150 the center could rent part of a small building he built and owned on Lawrence Street, they agreed. Moving out of the church was a marker of the start of a second stage in the life of the Murchison Community Center.

Stage Two: State

Although it was rejected, the ADAS grant submission, done in communication with the responsible government agency, was a learning experience for the center, as was the successful CDBG grant. What the center began to learn was how to jump through the hoops set by the government bureaucracy. Once the funding started to flow—$44,000 in 1996, $25,000 in each of 1997, 1998, and 1999—it dwarfed the funds raised through the social networks of the board members, i.e. church members, and defined the terms under which the center operated for the next stage of its life.

For example, the mission statement of the center made no reference to the original vision statement, and was developed by Mrs. Hamilton and Ms. Chestnut with the aim of fitting the requirements of the grant application process. Within a year Ms. Chestnut joined the staff of the City of Toledo Department of Neighborhoods and was assigned for some time as the CDBG liaison to the center. Since then, she has continued to look out for the interest of the center and provide valued unofficial advice.

CDBG is a program established in the 1980s when so many 1960s Great Society federal funding streams to impoverished communities were cut off. In their place, President Reagan and Congress directed a much smaller amount of funds through the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be doled out by city and county authorities according to federal guidelines. Thus CDBG provided federal funds, but local officials directed the flow.

Another example of an external authority setting the agenda for the center came when Mrs. Hamilton and a few others were working into the wee hours one night on another government grant proposal. They were stumped when it came to writing a needs statement, and read the suggestion "conduct a needs assessment of your community such as by means of a survey." They had never surveyed the community. The grant process used the same language of "needs assessment," so the idea of conducting a survey took hold.

In fact, most of them had been raised or had raised their own children in the community, but the exercise of a survey captured the attention of the center for several months. The board settled on 12 questions and eventually 116 surveys were gathered. It is not clear what use was made of the information, gathered in response to external bureaucracies rather than as an outgrowth of the center itself. Echoing the critique of John Kretzmann and John McKnight, the questions themselves portray the community as a collection of needs rather than a collection of resources that can be mobilized. (44)

When the local CBDG office reviewed the center's 1996 proposal, it recommended that the center partner with a startup Community Development Corporation. CDCs were again a product of the 1980s, which saw an epidemic of homelessness. By the 1990's in Toledo, the city had assigned most inner city districts to various CDCs and the CDCs were taking the lion's share of CDBG funding. This money subsidized them in building and occasionally renovating small numbers of inexpensive housing, and then selling them with great fanfare.

The Murchison Center neighborhood had been mostly left out of the gold rush. Roosevelt Revitalization and Development Corporation and the center were to partner and submit one proposal for 1996. This process again took attention away from the grassroots fundraising that the board had been focusing on, but the joint proposal led by the center was funded and stage two was really underway.

Because Murchison's governance was well established and programs were already underway relative to their partner, Ms. Chestnut, representing CDBG, recommended that the two organizations not collaborate financially after all. Roosevelt would go back to the drawing board. A new term, leverage, came to the board as Ms. Chestnut explained why the city had funded the center. The funds ($44,000) were to be used to leverage other dollars, so that the center would not remain 90% CDBG-funded. The city, the board learned, had funded the center 1) as part of the now-suspended Roosevelt partnership 2) as a fresh effort in census tracts 25 and 26 (which no doubt covered a CDBG gap) and 3) because the grant focused on job development.

Not only did the CDBG office recommend policy directions, but they required a complex of procurement, personnel, program and financial policies, procedures and reporting that the center had to master. One of the most onerous was the process of reimbursement. The monthly activity reports were to include every document produced that month plus a quantitative and descriptive report on each area of program activity. These reports were required before a monthly check was sent. Then each expenditure had to be documented, every check copied, and together submitted monthly to CDBG. Several weeks later a check would arrive for all approved expenses. Disputed or incompletely documented expenses would be delayed one month or more. In order to provide service the center had to obtain a line of credit, which they did, with the personal assurance of Bishop Murchison and his construction business track record.

Financial administration became particularly difficult given that the payroll and all bookkeeping was being done by a personal contact of St. James, an older gentleman who was in bad health for more than a year, making any change a sensitive matter. By October 1998 the indebtedness ballooned to more than $11,000.

As a result of the reporting requirements, programs were documented like never before, and a monthly number, reflecting the number of people participating in center programs, was reported. The total number hovered around 55 per month during 1997-1998.

As soon as the first CDBG grant began, three new board members were elected and an assistant director and program coordinators, all working part time, were hired. The terms of the grant did not allow for a full time salary for Mrs. Hamilton, so she continued to work a full time day job and volunteer her time to the center, taking occasional payments that just about equaled her travel and incidental expenses. The new individuals were either not members of St. James or were more loosely tied to the church; the staff members, only one from St. James, worked during the day or after school hours rather than in the evening when the board met, so the close personal ties that the board had used to keep the center together began to loosen.

The role of the board changed during this time. What had been an active fundraising committee became a bureaucratic group that approved policies and financial reports without taking action on such things as the indebtedness. Meetings were held almost weekly over 1995 and early 1996; then monthly meetings became the norm. Near-perfect board meeting attendance also became a thing of the past. The 1997 strategic plan, for instance, was the result of just four of 12 board members attending a session with a paid consultant and a representative from the city's plan commission. These two people wrote up the strategic plan.

Accompanying this shift, staff rather than volunteers carried out programming during this time. For example, a children's program that started out with arts and crafts with one volunteer followed by a rap session with another, Mr. Hamilton, was converted into that same volunteer doing arts and crafts as paid staff, with various "guest speakers" following the arts and crafts. With the program carried out as a job rather than a church youth mission, speakers were often absent, and the effect on the kids was not nearly as powerful, because there were fewer ongoing relationships with adults apart from the arts and crafts leader. Eventually the program was arts and crafts only, with the modest supplies and skills of the staff member, who worked days as a security guard.

Computer classes continued over the years, with different projects to buy or get machines donated. The board investigated but then declined to pursue a 1996 opportunity to apply for $80,000 from another CDC to build a computer lab. The reason noted in the board's minutes was "not enough room;" the grant was in fact more complex and with more stipulations than the board or staff was comfortable with. That same night the board adopted a slogan for the center: "Knowledge is Power." It is a curious reflection of the balance of power in the organization: the cautiousness of staff and the determination of the St. James members. Donated computers were obtained in lieu of the $80,000 (peripherals from the local MidAm Bank and four PCs from Owens Corning Corporation) and the organization connected with a more gradual citywide effort to bring computers into the community known as CATNeT. More >>