Community Power Is the Real ROI: Want Real Change? Trust the People

The phone call came on a Tuesday afternoon, and I knew immediately that the disruption to our work would be huge. Our local school district had decided to pull key programs from our neighborhood schools—reading intervention programs, enrichment activities, wraparound services that had taken years to secure—so they could be "reallocated to more challenging schools" across the district.

As the leader of a neighborhood development organization, I'd spent years building relationships, securing commitments, and advocating for these very programs. We'd celebrated each victory, each new initiative, each sign that our historically disinvested community was finally getting what it so deeply desired. Now, with one administrative decision, years of careful work could vanish overnight.

But this time was different. This time, we had something we'd never had before: one of our own sitting on the school board.

What happened next taught me the most important lesson of my career in community development: the difference between asking for power and taking it.

The Ceiling of Organizational Influence

Two years earlier, our community had grown frustrated with their school board representative—a well-meaning person who rarely attended neighborhood meetings and seemed disconnected from the daily realities of families in our area. When community concerns were raised, they got polite responses but little action. When promises were made, they were often forgotten by the next board meeting.

The breaking point came when this representative voted for a budget that shortchanged our schools while claiming to support neighborhood revitalization. That's when residents realized that having someone speak for them wasn't the same as having someone who was truly accountable to them.

I watched as neighbors who had never considered running for office began asking different questions: Why should we keep electing people who don't understand our community? What if one of us ran instead?

The conversations that followed revealed a truth that the community development field rarely discusses: even the most effective organizations hit a ceiling when they're the primary voice for community interests. We can advocate, we can build relationships, we can secure resources—but when systems make decisions that affect communities, organizational influence often isn't enough.

The question that emerged from those kitchen table conversations wasn't how to lobby more effectively. It was: What if communities didn't need intermediaries to represent their interests at all?

When Communities Claim Their Seats

The campaign that followed wasn't run by political consultants or funded by major donors. It was organized by parents, grandparents, and neighbors who understood that democracy works best when representatives actually come from the communities they serve.

The woman they recruited was a mother of three who had been a local school leader for years, asking tough questions and creating excellence. She knew the budget details because she'd been tracking how resources were allocated. She understood the programs because her children participated in them. She had credibility with other parents because she'd been advocating alongside them for years.

Her victory wasn't just about changing one vote on the school board. It was about fundamentally altering the relationship between our community and the institutions that shaped their children's futures.

From her first day in office, the dynamic changed. Community concerns weren't filtered through organizational representatives or diluted through bureaucratic processes. They came directly from someone who shared those same concerns, whose own children would be affected by every decision.

The Test: When Crisis Reveals True Power

When the phone call came about the program cuts, I realized we were about to discover whether community political power could protect community development gains in ways that organizational advocacy never could.

The proposed cuts were significant: reading intervention programs that were closing achievement gaps, enrichment activities that kept students engaged, and wraparound services that addressed the barriers many families faced. Losing them would undermine years of progress in our schools.

In the past, our organization would have sprung into action—scheduling meetings with administrators, rallying other advocates, preparing testimony for public hearings. We would have fought hard, and we might have saved some programs, but we would have been negotiating from a position of limited influence.

This time, the response was swift and decisive. Our community representative didn't wait for the public hearing to voice concerns. She was in the room when the cuts were proposed, asking immediate questions about the rationale, the data, and the impact on students. She had access to information before decisions were finalized, not after they were announced.

But more importantly, she had something our organizational advocacy had never possessed: the standing to demand accountability from her colleagues on the board. When other members tried to dismiss concerns about the cuts, she could point to specific students, specific families, specific outcomes that would be affected. She wasn't advocating for a community—she was the community, speaking with the authority that comes from lived experience.

The Protection Model: Democracy as Development Infrastructure

The programs weren't just saved—they were expanded. The board member our community had elected (and then two others that followed) used the budget discussions to highlight how these programs were actually producing better outcomes per dollar than similar initiatives in other parts of the district. She pushed for data that proved their effectiveness and secured commitments for multi-year funding that provided stability we'd never achieved through annual advocacy cycles.

Watching this unfold, I realized we were witnessing something profound: democracy working as it was designed to work. Not as a system where communities petition those in power, but as a system where communities exercise power directly.

This wasn't about having a sympathetic ear on the school board. This was about having someone who was accountable to the same neighbors, whose children attended the same schools, whose daily life was woven into the fabric of the community she represented.

The impact rippled beyond that single budget decision. Over the following years, I watched as this approach to community power transformed not just what happened in school board meetings, but how the entire district related to our neighborhood. Administrators knew that decisions affecting our community would be scrutinized by someone with both the expertise to understand the details and the standing to demand changes.

From Single Victory to Sustained Infrastructure

The success at the school board level inspired broader political engagement. The same core group of neighbors who had organized that first campaign began showing up at city council meetings when development decisions affected their community. They supported candidates for mayor who understood neighborhood priorities and whom they had supported as their state representative just a few years prior.

Each campaign was built on the last. Each victory created more leaders. Each success proved that sustained political engagement wasn't separate from community development—it was the infrastructure that made community development sustainable.

I think about the contrast between the fragility of our organizational advocacy and the durability of community political power. When organizations lose funding or leadership transitions happen, programs can disappear overnight. But when communities elect their own representatives and maintain sustained political engagement, they create protective infrastructure that outlasts any single initiative or leader.

The Real Return on Investment

Traditional metrics in our field focus on outputs: how many houses built, how many programs implemented, how many people served. But the real return on investment in community development comes from something much harder to measure: the transformation that happens when people stop seeing themselves as beneficiaries and start seeing themselves as decision-makers.

The community I'm describing didn't just save their school programs. They fundamentally altered the relationship between their neighborhood and the systems that affect their lives. They proved that authentic democracy doesn't require perfect conditions or unlimited resources—it requires communities that understand their own power and know how to use it.

As funders and practitioners, we face a choice. We can continue building programs that make communities dependent on our expertise and advocacy. Or we can invest in the infrastructure that makes communities independent: leadership development, civic engagement, and the kind of political education that helps people understand they don't need permission to participate in decisions affecting their lives.

The highest ROI in community development doesn't come from the efficiency of our programs. It comes from the moment communities realize they don't need us to save them—they need us to support them in saving themselves.

The Question That Changes Everything

That crisis over the school program cuts taught me to ask a different question when evaluating community development work. Instead of "How many people did we serve?" or "What programs did we implement?" I now ask: "What would happen to this community's progress if our organization disappeared tomorrow?"

If the answer is that progress would stop, then we've built dependency, not development. If the answer is that the community would protect and advance their own interests because they have the power to do so, then we've done something far more valuable than delivering services. We've helped transfer power.

The day our community's school board representative cast the decisive vote to not only preserve but expand the programs that were slated for cuts, I realized I was witnessing the most important outcome our organization could achieve: the moment when the community no longer needed us to speak for them because they had learned to speak for themselves—and had claimed the seats where decisions were actually made.

That's not just good community development. That's democracy working the way it was designed to work. And it's the only foundation strong enough to support the thriving neighborhoods we're all working to create.

What would change in your work if communities had the political power to protect their own interests? I'd welcome your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.