This Qualitative Framework Uncovers Community Needs

This sponsored series is created in partnership with The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF), a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. Read the complete series. Decisions about community development too often get made solely with data, based on things like the Census and its detailed demographic breakdowns about income, education or housing costs. The Center for Transforming Communities insists something important is always missing from urban planning: the resident voice. The Memphis-based nonprofit social equity firm, which advances change by empowering organizers and building neighborhood democracies, set out to collect qualitative data and interpret it in a way that centers community knowledge. The Measuring Love engagement framework is its resident-led organizing model, employing community organizers who conduct more than 1,000 one-on-one conversations each year. What they collect supports research such as the Storied Communities, Community Stories project, which demonstrated the depth of residents’ understanding of local economic development organizations. “The stories of communities are the key platform for how we shift policies, how we create effective advocacy, but also how we build power in communities,” says Justin Merrick, Executive Director of CTC Midsouth. Measuring Love to Fight Segregation and Disinvestment Merrick points out that Memphis has a history of segregation and disinvestment of Black communities, but it also boasts a rich history of racial justice movements and Black activism going back to the 1950s. Memphis is home to the Lorraine Hotel, the location of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, which was preceded by weeks of racial tensions exacerbated by police brutality against supporters of the sanitation workers’ strike that King was there to support. Today, segregation in Memphis persists, with the resurgence of redistricting sparking organizing, and inequities were on display during the pandemic via disparities in testing rates and vaccine access. It was painfully clear to CDC Midsouth that they needed a way to develop a community narrative more likely to drive equity. “The infrastructure that the city and formal entities had, we discovered during COVID, did not have proximity to the communities that were most disinvested,” says Merrick. “As a result, a lot of resources during that time were not used in the most effective manner, and even in some cases went to waste.” Among its goals, the center wanted to look more closely at the competition for funding, which often became “fractured” among multiple grassroots organizations. “The Measuring Love Framework was a way to achieve that,” says Merrick, citing a “brown paper” authored by Sammy Nuñez and Shiree Teng and published by Latino Community Foundation. The framework invites community advocates to “make love explicit, intentional and measurable.” Merrick says, in its implementation, CTC Midsouth relies on the framework in three key areas: - Individual transformation, helping leaders examine their own relationships to power and community. - Interpersonal collaboration, strengthening trust and relationships among leaders and organizations. - Structural change, embedding those values in long-term systems such as cooperative businesses or land trusts. Alongside Measuring Love, CTC Midsouth uses Results-Based Accountability, a framework developed by Equity and Results, that challenges community organizers to ask whether the work they’re doing truly benefits the people they serve. Initiatives for Systems Change CTC Midsouth funded some of this work through an award from The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF), a funders’ collaborative that invests in organizations on the front lines of advocacy for neighborhoods affected by systemic oppression as they build power through cultural practices. The C&CPF unrestricted investment, alongside the Measuring Love and Results-Based Accountability frameworks, has helped CTC Midsouth strengthen a coalition of local organizations as they share resources rather than compete for them. Part of what they’ve built is the Resident Leadership Training Program, which provides financial support to emerging leaders and helps them develop skills in organizing, advocacy, storytelling, and data interpretation. Other key initiatives include the Grief and Wellness Fund, a resident-led governing body known as the FREEDOM Council, and a community hub for solidarity and mutual aid called The Commons. “They’re really working across different sectors, and they’re responding to what communities need and want,” says Erik Takeshita, director of C&CPF. “I feel so grateful because we’ve been able to help support some of these different initiatives that are … working to try to change systems.” One way CTC Midsouth is changing systems is by designing a grant program to support organizations serving Black and brown communities across the city. CTC Midsouth is an intermediary that passes on funding from the Memphis Community Foundation. “We have a concrete ecosystem of players that [actually do the work and guide the decisions] doing shared governance and sharing resources,” says Merrick. “We have a city that has a lot of investments, and because of the political economy we’re in, we see consolidation happen across resources.” Creating Assets for Community Using data from its organizers’ conversations, CTC Midsouth identified community investment opportunities, including two homes acquired through the Binghamton Land Trust, an organization that rehabilitates blighted homes and sells them to the community at affordable rates. One of the homes is where the community has been meeting as its hub in Klondike, which Merrick refers to as a cultural asset. What they’ve learned along the way changed the community, and it’s changed Merrick personally. “My understanding of the work is completely changed because of this investment,” says Merrick. “The work to get the resources into the community [is] actually about who’s making the decisions while it’s happening. Unless folks like myself that are the drivers take the time to slow down to help build that capacity of the leaders to do that for themselves, we don’t get the transformation that lasts.” Learn more about CTC Midsouth’s approach to building community power through culture in a webinar and podcast featuring Executive Director Justin Merrick. Nia Springer-Norris is a writer and educator in the exurbs of Chicago. She enjoys crafting narratives centering changemakers that walk the intersections of technology, media, culture, and business. She has contributed to SUCCESS, Business Insider, Next City, Kirkus Reviews, among other publications. She also teaches journalism and communications courses.