Chantel Rush Tebbe is managing director of The Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Program. Her work advances the foundation’s efforts to catalyze effective community and economic development practices that expand opportunities for people with low incomes in American cities. Her work supports on-the-ground efforts, exchange of ideas across cities, initiatives seeking to advance community-driven place-based practice, national community development intermediaries, and research aimed at promoting effective urban practice and policy. She serves on the boards of the National Housing Law Project, Living Cities, and Equal Measure.

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Chantel Rush Tebbe:

It really feels as though traditional institutional power structures still run apart from or in parallel to, or sometimes at odds with leaders, especially leaders of color. So what we often find is there’s very top-down strategies from civic leaders who believe they have a way to “fix” what’s happening in communities. And sometimes they have an area of expertise around business where they might know a thing or two, but more often than not, the strategies are pretty disconnected.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Welcome to The Measure. I’m your host and moderator, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. Equal Measure partners with foundations, nonprofits, and government organizations to apply new ways of thinking and learning to advance social change. On The Measure, we host conversations about centering racial equity and how to design, implement, evaluate, and communicate efforts to transform inequitable systems. Today we are honored to be joined by Chantel Rush Tebbe. Chantel is a managing director of the American Cities Program at the Kresge Foundation. She also is a board member at Equal Measure. Welcome Chantel.

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

Hi, Leon. It’s nice to be here.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

It’s great to have you. So as you know, at Equal Measure, we seek to drive place-based systems change that centers racial equity using our superpowers, evaluation, strategy and communications. So we believe context of place is so deeply entangled in the work that we do. So I’d like to start there if you don’t mind, with a more personal question about how you think about the context of place in your own journey. How has your experiences of place helped shape your personal story?

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

One of my grandfathers was born in the Rust Belt near Youngstown, Ohio, and my other grandfather was born in the deep south near Starkville, Mississippi, and both of them, in the fifties and sixties decided that they would move to California for different reasons. And in California they had completely different economic opportunities, were able to purchase houses that appreciated in value in a way that was completely different from their family members that stayed in the south and stayed in the Rust Belt. And so every day I think about the fact that in our work we talk about how people, where they’re born, where they live, their zip code, can create completely different experiences and different lives. And it’s something that I think about because it’s something that’s very true in our family, but my family’s experience of place has always been very much colored by race.

My grandfather, where he grew up in the deep south, he would tell me stories of as a child walking home from school or different places and needing to hide in the drainage ditch by the side of the road if a car was coming by because he wasn’t sure who it was and he didn’t want to get in any trouble. And so he had this one experience. My dad as a child in Los Angeles has memories of watching Los Angeles burn while the Watts riots were taking place. And so he has in his mind a very forefront experience of race and racism growing up even in California in the sixties and seventies.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I’d love to hear, as you think about the transition that both your grandparents made to California, how has that even shaped you as you think about your place?

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

Yeah, that’s interesting. So I grew up in Orange County, California, which is politically conservative, but a melting pot of different races. I was one of probably two or three Black students at my elementary school. And so I was definitely like an other in that environment. And I grew up in a lower middle class community that had immigrant population. So Orange County where I grew up, the neighborhood that I grew up in is actually a very large Vietnamese American community and a very large Latin American Hispanic speaking community. So California was this melting pot, that my family never, ever got to be a part of an experience.

And so that was different and it gave me a different perspective, I think, of what a multicultural society can look like that’s very different than what we may be experience and we talk about here where I live now in the Midwest, and then for me, the racism I experienced was very different. Southern California, Orange County racism looks more like, “Oh, well you probably just got into Stanford ’cause you’re Black”, or it’s kind of offhanded comments that even in a situation or an environment that is purportedly relatively progressive or even when you’re around progressive people, there’s still a lot of racism. It’s a different racist experience, but it’s deeply exist. And I see it in my work and everywhere that I go today.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

As you talk about your work, you still spend a lot of time in place, right? It’s your experience at the Kresge Foundation, it’s deep and it’s place-based work in American cities and in communities of color. The history and context require us understanding the racism that you are naming and other narratives of intentional policies, practices, and procedures that disadvantage so many communities of color. So I’d love to hear how power dynamics, how that exists in communities today that impact your work. Curious how that gets named and in particular, what still needs to shift for these communities to thrive?

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

Well, in so many of the communities that we work in at Kresge, it really feels as though traditional institutional power structures still run apart from or in parallel to, or sometimes at odds with leaders, especially leaders of color that are working in deep proximity to community. So what we often find is there’s very top-down strategies from civic leaders who believe they have a way to “fix” what’s happening in communities. And sometimes they have an area of expertise around business where they might know a thing or two, but more often than not, the strategies are pretty disconnected from the judgment and the wisdom of local communities. So you can take a few different hacks. You can invest your time and money in leaders of color who are proximate to community issues, who are very focused on addressing systems of oppression. Or you can try to shift and work from the top and try to get folks who are traditional power brokers to understand that their work is not going to be effective if they’re not working in partnership with people who are closer to community.

And so we’ve taken the approach of doing both, simply because we think, well, this stuff’s pretty urgent, and we don’t know that people in the communities that we serve necessarily would like to wait for the power structure today to be completely dismantled for them to have better results in their blocker or in their neighborhoods. So we have funded different strategies and projects to help folks who are in the power structures understand that they need to work differently to reorient their thought. And then at the same time, we try to invest very, very deeply in organizations led by people of color in neighborhoods who can do the everyday ground up work and who have a firm view of what the policy changes would be. And our thought is that what needs to happen is that those two groups of people become more and more in line, that they talk more, and that the folks who have been in the traditional power structure actually reorient and change the work and start to give up some of that power over time.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

I’m curious where you are investing both in the leaders of color and also working from the top, maybe there’s still a lot more work to be done. So I’m mindful that maybe you’re naming that that’s the challenge that’s in front of you, but you’re in a position where you’re bringing folks to the table. So I’m curious about where you’ve seen some opportunities where it’s laying some good ground for shifting power.

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

Yeah, I think the Federal Reserve Bank’s Working Cities Challenge was a very interesting attempt at this. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was trying to figure out how can leaders and communities make a difference? And they basically determined looking at years and years of newspapers, it was like people had to have a clear goal and they needed to act on those goals. And I mean, the idea with Working Cities Challenge was that there was going to be a civic table was going to make change, but what they did was they said, “Okay, each initiative team is going to get technical assistance and they’re going to work with different coaching organizations.” Now that can sound really silly, but in the case of Working City Challenge, what they did is they trained people in, here’s what community engagement looks like. Here’s what authentic community engagement looks like.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s artificial. How do you recognize race and race equity? How can you think about whether or not you’re actually contributing to systems change? And so you don’t want to spend all of your time and efforts providing training wheels to folks who maybe don’t get it. But when you have a group of civic leaders who want to have a goal, their heart is in the right place, what are the tools that you can provide to have them have that analysis? And then how do you ensure that you select groups and organizations that are working with people who are actually tied to what’s happening in communities? And I think that was a good example of there are several different projects that happened throughout Working Cities Challenge where people who would have, I believe, been working in their own silo the way they had always worked, were actually spending time talking with people in direct service organizations, at schools, at community development corporations, and coming together and figuring out different solutions.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

And you’re putting your finger on both the challenge and the opportunity that change takes time, but it does require to center the voices of community. I’m curious how you hold that. How do you think about the importance of centering community voice? And if you have examples of maybe one or two where you’ve seen community driven solutions or innovations that help create thriving healthy communities for communities of color.

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

I would suggest that truly revelatory community building doesn’t actually happen with one solution or one innovation. I mean, I think there’s never, ever almost never a silver bullet. Rather, there are a series of action. And some examples we’ve seen are that there is a lot of strength in creating civic engagement, social cohesion, community advocacy, getting people together to actually identify and talk about what they want to change in their neighborhoods. I think a lot of people in social change work write off projects or programs. They think, “Oh, that’s add a mistake, it’s not really doing anything significant or from a systems’ perspective.” But one of the things we’ve seen is that projects can generate community momentum. They can create change, they can build a sense of sovereignty that, hey, we’re going to do something here and it’s going to make a difference, and that can power a community through to a next step and a next action.

One example is in New Orleans, the Ashé Cultural Center. So that is an amazing cultural organization along a historic corridor in New Orleans, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, really important civil rights icon. And they not only have claimed and built their center on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, but they recently, years ago, opened a 200-feet theater, 10,000 square feet performance arts center. And that’s not just about the building. It’s about claiming that we’re going to actually preserve and celebrate the African diaspora in this neighborhood. So there’s no one example of something that’s been done completely. You could probably pull some out of your hat, but I think it’s more important to understand the small steps and pieces and the pieces of hard work that generate momentum that can add up.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, I really do appreciate you acknowledging that there isn’t a silver bullet when we talk about play-based work, systems change work, but also acknowledging that as you do the work, there is this tendency of people looking for an answer around place-based systems change work that is not tied to programming because there’s a sense that we got to really think about how do we change systems and what’s the work that needs to happen to really change the systems? And one program alone is not going to really get us there and our organization, Equal Measure, we’ve been taking this framework, racial equity through the Racial Equity Institute, their groundwater framework that has helped us really acknowledge the differences as we think about the work. They use the metaphor, the lake where the fish are not thriving to think about different levels of change. There’s the fish, the lake, and then the groundwater.

What is the work we need to do together? As I think as I listen to you, you’re very much in that space where you’re looking at programs, you’re looking at the fish level, you’re thinking about how the fish level is tied to the lake and how the lake where the systems are, and you’re thinking about the groundwater and how the groundwater is tied to some of the root causes that are tied to those systems that have history and narratives. So it feels like you’re sitting at the intersections of the entire ecosystem. So I’m curious how you think about that fish, lake, groundwater in your work as you think about investing across sectors and different disciplines.

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

I think this is similar to how we think about power dynamics. So in a power dynamic analysis, you’re figuring out how do you connect power brokers with the vision and understanding of what community members are asking for and you’re trying to figure out how community members can voice their concerns and demand different action from power brokers. In the context of social change, where you’re thinking about, are we working in direct services or are we creating this huge policy change, it’s really easy to look down on organizations that are doing direct services. We hear all the time in the philanthropic field like, “Oh, well, they’re serving 25 people, but what a difference is that going to make?” And we just fundamentally don’t believe that. We really see all of these systems working together in concert. I was talking to a colleague yesterday and she was reminding me of a group in the Central Valley in California, called Teva La Salute.

They both do local work around food access, but they also advocate for policies and investments to promote health and wellbeing for disadvantaged communities. And they’re best positioned to do that because they’re actually interfacing with and understand those challenges. And they’ve actually had a lot of success. There was a recent bill that passed in California that is seeking to make it easier for food vendors and street vendors who don’t have traditional restaurants or establishments that you would be able to finance if you had access to capital, that makes it easier for people with smaller establishments to do business. And that’s actually a big change in terms of who’s involved in economic inclusion. But it starts with, and it comes from an organization that’s really rooted in the ground.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I’m curious as you’re talking about the role that an organization can play to impact systems change. I’m not sure if you recall that, but I remember there was one example that we were talking about that I was curious if you might recall, which organization that was.

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

Yes. We were discussing sustainability in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood of Detroit. So when it comes to climate change and flooding, it’s very easy to think that, oh, that has to happen. Everybody has to think about this from a global federal level, and only government can make a difference. And part of that is true, but how does government know exactly what to do in a way that’s going to make a difference on the ground in community? There is an organization on the east side of Detroit, Jefferson East, and they do traditional community development work for neighborhood residents, access to programming services, small business real estate, and they have become an organization that understands when flooding happens in Jefferson Chalmers, how residents receive the support they need.

Well, that doesn’t just stand alone. The University of Michigan has actually created a sustainability clinic in Detroit, and they seek to have people figure out what are the policies and solutions and actions that need to happen in Detroit to remove some of that threat of flooding from the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. And it’s from organizations like the University of Michigan that ideas can be pushed up to different levels.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, I think it’s so helpful, I think for people to understand how this work is not done in silos. When you’re able to do that effectively is when we’re really, really getting to the systems’ transformation that we’re talking about. So really appreciate those examples that allow us to be able to hear that.

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

Yeah, and I think this is very exciting because I think more and more organizations and people are recognizing this. We’ve received many calls from the federal government over the years from different government agencies who are like, “Hey, we’re trying to make these policies. We’re trying to put together these grant programs. We’re not really sure how that lands in community.” And so we’ve spoken over the years and connected folks with people from community in cities across the country, and they’ve given ideas, and you can see the federal government trying to respond to some of these. During the Obama administration, there was the SD2 initiative where government was trying to embed itself better to figure out how funds and federal initiatives could land in cities.

We also see that local organizations are understanding the role that they need to play in policy. In New Orleans there’s an organization called Water Wise Gulf South, and they do an amazing job of building green infrastructure and advocating and organizing with community members about what has to happen with city government, with state government to protect their neighborhood. So you could look at that and think, oh, it’s a individual fish exercise, putting a rain barrel in. But no, it’s actually generating an entire movement of people across the city, especially marginalized people of color who know about this and are asking for something to happen differently. And when you pair that with legal experts and state level advocacy organizations, you can really start to get somewhere powerful.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Love that. And as I think about the synergies of the ecosystem, many times people doing this work could have this feeling of it feeling overwhelming because change takes time. And so I’d like to end with a question that what gives you hope as you continue to navigate this work and love to hear what gives you hope?

Chantel Rush Tebbe:

So a few months ago, I would’ve told you with my own story and the story of my grandparents and the fact that my white mother could not have married my Black father just as early as 1967, right? I would tell you, “Oh my gosh, so much has changed since 1967.” But then you have things happening like the recent court decision where, shoot, no more affirmative action in schools. And well, people like me who got to go to Stanford, will everybody have that access going forward? So it doesn’t really feel that great in this moment, but I just go back to the folks that I get to work with in me every day in my job and in Detroit, auntie Nass’s house and the work that she does to provide a place of support for kids that are frankly left out in the field and are not supported by traditional nonprofit social services.

If you go to the south part of Memphis, you go to Vance Avenue Child Development Center, and you meet Barbara and she’s just cooking hundreds of meals for kids every day after school. And then you meet people in Memphis who want to figure out how to support the work of Ms. Barbara, and they’re in government, they’re in philanthropy. They are in some of those historically traditional power broker types of positions that you think wouldn’t even be attuned to what Ms. Barbara was doing. So I think there’s more and more of us that are working on these challenges, and I have to think that because it’s simply the right thing that hopefully we’ll get there over time after some fits and starts and setbacks and frustrations.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

I love that. I like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation with Chantel. It comes from the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from a speech given at the National Cathedral less than a week before he was assassinated. “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” You can learn more about Equal Measure by visiting our website equalmeasure.org, and be sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to The Measure Podcast.