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Workshop to focus on funding community development projects

Published: October 17, 2002

By CHRISTINE VIDAL
Contributing Editor

Obtaining funding for community development projects and programs will be the subject of a workshop to be sponsored by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy and the UB Law School Development Clinics.

"Financing the Next Generation of Community Development: A Workshop" will be held today and tomorrow in 545 O'Brian Hall, North Campus.

Since 1986, community development has had great success with government-initiated partnerships between nonprofit and for-profit groups to create affordable housing through the low-income housing tax credit program, said Lauren Breen, clinical instructor of law in the Community Economic Development Clinic.

Breen and Sara Faherty, clinical instructor of law in the Community Economic Development Clinic, are organizers of the workshop.

"But community development does not end with housing," Breen said. "The very quality of life and where individuals succeed and fail turns on whether they have access to a living wage, adequate health care, quality child care, transportation, a decent supermarket and banking services."

The workshop will focus on new and traditional methods, as well as innovative techniques, for financing community economic development, and how those methods will apply in the decade to come.

Topics to be addressed in the workshop will include:

  • Community services in the context of development

  • New markets tax credits—possibilities and pitfalls

  • Tax credit and other public financing for child care

  • Holistic approaches to community building.

Participants will include community development advocates, multidisciplinary legal and resource planners, members of revitalization groups and private charitable foundations, and public-interest lobbyists, as well as faculty members representing a variety of disciplines.

In addition to Breen and Faherty, they are David Beer, director of housing development, Common Ground Community; Brad Caftel, National Economic Development and Law Center; Tom Disare, UB clinical associate professor of law; Steven Dow, executive director, Community Action Project, Tulsa; Luvon Dungee, Sandtown-Winchester Community Development Corporation, Baltimore; Amy Gilman, Local Initiatives Support Corporation's Community Investment Collaborative for Kids; George Hezel, UB clinical associate professor of law; Kathleen Kost, UB associate professor of social work and director of the UB Institute for Non-Profit Agencies.

Also, Christopher Mele, UB associate professor of sociology; Kathleen Noonan, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Baltimore; Ronald Phillips, president, Coastal Enterprises, Inc.; Peter Pitegoff, UB professor of law and vice dean for academic affairs; Robert Rapoza, RAPOZA Associates, Washington, D.C.; Alexander J. Reichl, associate professor of political science, Queens College, City University of New York; Jan Stokley, executive director, Child Care Coordinating Council, San Mateo, Calif.; Mildred Warner, assistant professor of city and regional planning and associate director of the Community and Rural Development Institute, Cornell University, and Norman Yancey, Community Building in Partnership, Inc., Baltimore.

For more information on the workshop, call the Baldy Center at 645-2102 or go to http://www.law.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/comdev02.html.