One of the most exciting community development projects to surface in the San Francisco Bay Area is the new SparkPoint Center.  I’ll admit that I may be a little bit biased since the organization that I work for is one of the founding partners.

Let me give you a little background on my organization, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC).  EBALDC is an affordable housing developer in Oakland, California that not only builds and manages housing and community facilities, but also provides economic development programs for the community at large.  For the last ten years, we have been offering Individual Development Account programs to help low-income families and individuals buy their first homes, start businesses and go to college.  In addition, we have one of the largest volunteer income tax assistance sites in Oakland, bringing over $1.5 million in tax refunds back to the community over the last six years .

But with the unprecedented economic challenges of the last couple of years, challenges that have severely impacted Oakland’s low-income communities of color, we knew more needed to be done.  And the opportunity to do something more came in the invitation to participate in the new SparkPoint Center.  The SparkPoint Center is an innovative financial center concept that is being spearheaded by the United Way of the Bay Area.  Last summer, United Way approached EBALDC and four other Oakland community based organizations to develop the concept of bringing together financial programs that help low-income families to increase their income, manage their debt and build their assets – all in one center. Additional partners include the City of Oakland through its Bank on Oakland program, an effort to link unbanked city residents into the mainstream banking system.  All of the organizations immediately took to the idea because we saw the immense benefits of being able to offer families free income tax assistance, job training, academic counseling, small business training, matched savings accounts, mainstream banking options, financial education and coaching, credit counseling and foreclosure assistance all under one roof.

The SparkPoint Center is also taking a different approach in how we work with the people who will walk through our doors.  They are not going to be treated in the way that so many of them are used to – as case numbers, clients or even customers.  Instead they will enter SparkPoint as members who are empowered to set and achieve their own financial goals. We like to make the analogy of SparkPoint as kind of like a fitness club.  Members can get financial coaching and other services at the SparkPoint Center in order to achieve their own self-determined financial fitness goals.

There is much to be done as we ready to open our doors next week (Monday, March 30). And we are just in the pilot or “learning” phase. We have made our plans, but the months ahead are where the rubber really hits the road.  It is community development in action.

Official National CAPACD Blogger, Charise Fong, is the Director of Neighborhood Economic Development at EBALDC.

Continuing his trend of transparency and access, President Obama is now accepting questions from everyone about the economy which he will answer on a live streaming broadcast on whitehouse.gov.  You can submit your questions by creating an account here, then you can rate other peoples questions up or down.  The President will then pick a handful of the most popular questions based on the ratings, and answer them live on Thursday, March 26th.

This is really a first for the White House.  Never before have we seen a President who is opening up his office doors to the people of this country and answering the hard questions posed by them directly.  I look forward to seeing this broadcast and reading the questions posed by the community.

Our partners at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) has just posted more pictures of the event here.  These pictures really give you a stronger sense of the volume of people we saw last Saturday!

The partners haven’t done a complete debrief yet, so I’ll be sharing a quick summary of the event in a later post. Long story short: our outreach efforts were a success! Although many of us there were saddened at the long line–at one point the line reached around the block of the Orozco Academy–we were glad to see that they were willing to overcome any embarrassment or shame and come to the event to received education, counseling, and hopefully a solution.

I had promised photos earlier, and I hope I don’t disappoint! I didn’t take any pictures of the fair when it was full swing, since I was feeling very conscious of the fact that many times families from our communities are very much reluctant in having their pictures taken at these sorts of events. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy the pictures of the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center office in the north side of Chicago, as well pictures of the set up!  I wish I had more time to get more pictures of the folks involved in organizing this event, but I’m afraid my pictures will have to suffice for now.

From L to R: myself, Kristen (the Resurrection Project), Romana, Chloe (KRCC)

If you’ve been perusing around this blog and the social networking site, you may have noticed that many of the things I post are on foreclosures. That isn’t to suggest that foreclosure mitigation is the entirety of my work or interests–I hope to blog more on other things–but it has been taking up a lot of mental space.

Why, you ask? Well, National CAPACD has been working with the National Urban League and the National Council of La Raza on focusing the foreclosure mitigation efforts for communities and homeowners of color. While this has been an informal multicultural effort for a good part of 2008, Bank of America has approached the three organizations with an offer to formalize the coalition work under the name of Alliance for Stabilizing our Communities.

The three national groups are kicking off the Alliance with a home retention/rescue fair in Chicago, in partnership with some of our local member organizations. The Korean American Resource and Cultural Center, the Chicago Urban League, and the Resurrection Project (NCLR affiliate) are working together to bring culturally and linguistically competent homeownership education and home retention information to the communities of Chicago. At National CAPACD, I and many of us on staff have spent a lot of time coordinating with the other organizations involved, and I can tell you that we are very excited to see this event launched.

So, Romana and I are in Chicago right now to support KRCC in this event–please check back to the blog and the social network site for pictures of our Chicago members and a report back from the event!

I’d also like to note that this is just another example of the cross-cultural/ethnic efforts that our members are engaging here, especially in Chicago; another one of our Chicago member groups, the Chinese American Service League, is working in conjunction with the Resurrection Project to build additional affordable rental housing here in the Windy City.  Unfortunately it looks like Romana and I won’t have time to visit the site or CASL during this visit, but for those of you in Chicago–please feel free to join the social networking site and share pictures! [Actually, that goes for everyone:  join! share pictures! ]

It’s great that you’re coming to read the blog, and I encourage you to keep on doing so!

But, have you checked out the National CAPACD Social Network?  Many people in the CAPACD network have already set up profiles and are getting active on there.   You can connect with amazing experts in the community development field like Grant Din, National CAPACD Board member and non-profit consultant.  Or you can touch base with Jamie Tse, a senior member of A-VOYCE (the youth development program of Asian CDC) who is connecting her passion for the arts with community development in Boston’s Chinatown.    Leave a message for National CAPACD Official Blogger and Public Policy Manager at Chinatown CDC, Malcolm Yeung and share your thoughts on neighborhood activism.  Check out the discussion forums as more information comes to light around the foreclosure crisis.

There are so many opportunities to connect with National CAPACD members and share information on best practices.   Set up your profile today!

I’m a first generation Chinese American who grew up Houston, Texas.  I went to college on the East coast (Southeast that is, don’t confuse me with the “Back East” crowd) to get away from my “traditional” Chinese parents.  I majored in Organic Chemistry like all good pre-med Asians, made a quick stop over in Colorado to pick up a masters in history, volunteered a stint with Americorps, and then worked in bike shops.  When I “grew up,” I had a brief taste of the good life as a suit wearing, big buck lawyer at a fortune 500 law firm in San Francisco.  So how in the world, people ask me, did I end up being a neighborhood activist in San Francisco Chinatown?

To answer that question, I’d recommend that anyone who visits San Francisco take a tour of our Chinatown.  But don’t get sucked into just any tour.  Take the tour run by the Adopt an Alleyway (AAA) Youth Program.  Sure, the youth who run the tour will tell and point you to the typical tourist stuff –like how Chinatown was the first concentration of Asian Americans in America, was run by historic family associations who ran the community for over a century, and houses the distinctly “Chinese” looking architecture that emerged after the 1906 earthquake as a way of “saving” the community for the Chinese.

But, if you want to learn a little more, peer behind the veil constructed by the tourist industry, they’ll answer questions about a community that is far more than a historic relic.  They’ll point you to a living, breathing, evolving community that serves thousands of low-income immigrants, a community that houses seniors and families, a community that is a literal gateway for newer arrivals trying to get their footing.  They can point you to a community that contains the City’s largest stock of affordable housing units – in the form of single room occupancy “SRO” hotels that are, all too frequently, occupied by entire families, a community that is so dense, that alleyways often serve as the best source of open space for children to play in, and a community that is one of the few places that monolingual immigrants can find in-language and culturally appropriate health care, social services, and jobs.

The fact is, San Francisco Chinatown lies at the center of Chinese American life, and not only for the low-income immigrants who choose to live there.  Chinatown is also the historic and I’d argue present “capital” of Chinese America in the Bay Area (and we’d like to think beyond . . .).  Its impact extends beyond San Francisco as its many “emigrants” frequently return “home” for a dose of “soul food,” Church and temple, Chinese school for kids, and lion-dancing lessons.  Chinatown is also a locus of political power, a literal base from which Chinese Americans can organize a “base” to hold local, state, and even national politicians accountable to the needs of this specific community and, sometimes, even the broader needs of “Chinese America.”

But Chinatown is also an anomaly in the physical landscape of San Francisco and under constant threat.  Viewed from on high, it is a literal hole in the landscape – a depression of low-rise, historic “looking” buildings surrounded by modern office skyscrapers, luxury condo high-rises, and high rent flats that dot the bordering hills.  As it turns out, Chinatown lays right smack dab in the middle of some of this country’s most expensive real estate.  Real estate speculators salivate over the “potential” earning power of Chinatown and fervently believe that the underlying land is too valuable for its existing community based use.  They dream of “flipping” its SRO hotels and transforming them into high-rise towers reminiscent of Shanghai or Hong Kong.  Under this constant pressure, the preservation and strengthening of Chinatown (and places like it) have been and must continue to be an intentional, concerted act.

Spaces like Chinatown would not exist if it were left solely up to the market (even in these ailing economic times).  For Chinatown and ethnic gateways like it to continue to exist, for it to continue to serve low-income, monolingual immigrants families and seniors, and for it to serve as the locus of the cultural and political institutions that make up and identify Chinese America – it must be fought for, struggled over, defended, and expanded.  In moments of opportunity, this can be done proactively by implementing community wide “area plans” like San Francisco’s 1986 Chinatown Rezoning effort (that is largely responsible for the present physical geography of the neighborhood).  At other times, it must be defended through “street level” activities like protests and eviction defense on a block by block, building by building, unit by unit, and brick by brick basis.  In the coming weeks and months, I’m hoping to write more about these local struggles that, I believe, have broader regional, state, and national implications.  And that, is why I am a Chinatown activist.