GPPR Podcast Editor Brian Marroquín (MPM ’22) spoke with Sol Anderson, the President & CEO of the Evanston Community Foundation, about the role of community foundations in public policy and dynamic approaches to community building. In this podcast, Mr. Anderson emphasizes the importance of relationships and listening to the community to bring positive change and build meaningful paths to opportunity. Moreover, “It can’t just be policy change or bust.” Sol describes how we can all take steps on the way to dynamic solutions.
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Podcast Transcript:
[Episode Start]
Introduction by Brian Marroquín: As of 2020, there are more than 130,000 foundations in the U.S., holding $1.7 trillion in assets and providing more than $82 billion in grants. Some foundations are large and recognizable, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But many are much smaller and can be found in nearly every community across the U.S. Some assume that foundations are simply philanthropies designed to give out money. However, foundations can often use a range of strategies to influence policy across areas such as economic development, public health, and much more.
I’m Brian Marroquín, a Junior Editor for the Georgetown Public Policy Review. And today we’ll explore the role of community foundations with Sol Anderson, President and CEO of the Evanston Community Foundation. We’ll learn about the field and how his foundation approaches community building, public policy, and race equity.
Let’s go!
Brian Marroquín: Sol, it’s so great to have you join us today.
Sol Anderson: Yeah – great to be here.
Marroquín: I’m proud to call you a friend and colleague. And as people like to do to their friends, I’m going to embarrass you a little bit. Sol is an exceptional leader and an even better person. He gets things done for the community and brings people in each step of the way. Prior to his work at the Evanston Community Foundation, he led iGrow Chicago, an organization that addresses the root causes of trauma and violence through a wide range of holistic supports. Prior to that, he was an executive director of LIFT, a national nonprofit that invests in parents to build, well being, financial strength, and social connection. Sol has a long track record in youth services as a youth coordinator in the city of Evanston, an academic director and tutor and so much more. But what he’s probably proudest of is his family, both his family’s story of perseverance and faith – and the future Sol is building as a husband and father.
So, Sol, before we jump in, I just wanted to let people know not only who you are but also the joy and love that you bring to this work. So, thank you, my friend.
Anderson: Thank you so much.
Marroquín: So, if you could tell us a little bit about Evanston, Illinois, and the mission of the Evanston Community Foundation.
Anderson: Evanston is a relatively small suburban community directly north of the city of Chicago. So, the south end of Evanston borders the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago right along the lake. It’s sort of best known for being the home of Northwestern University. So that’s how most people kind of know Evanston. But Evanston is much more than just the University and much more than, I would say just a suburb of Chicago. The sort of joke is that Evanston sees Chicago as a south suburb of Evanston as opposed to [Evanston] as a north suburb of Chicago.
Anderson: But beyond that, it’s incredibly, particularly relative to other north suburbs of Chicago, a really diverse community, not just racially, but I think most importantly, sort of economically. So, to kind of put it in plain terms, about 12% of the residents of Evanston live below the poverty line, and that’s not an overwhelming number, especially relative to Chicago where I believe the number is north of 20%. But when you compare that to our two closest neighboring suburbs, the suburb of Skokie, about 5% of the community residents live below the poverty line. And then Wilmette the next community north of us, it’s like 2%. And it’s really interesting because our sort of median income here is about family income is about $102,000. In Wilmette is about $144,000. In Skokie, it’s lower about $60,000 to $70,000 when you really look at the wealth and then the level of poverty here. And that’s definitely connected to Evanston being a diverse community have a relatively large population of about 18% of the residents here are African American, and about 9% are Latinx/Latino/Latina residents. We know in America the poverty is concentrated more among communities of color. And so, it just creates a lot of unique dynamics here that don’t necessarily exist in other suburban communities and makes the work here beautiful and complicated and tiring and messy, but really important and really rewarding.
Anderson: At the Evanston Community Foundation, our charge is to create an equitable, vibrant, and inclusive Evanston. So, we try to work with the resources in our community and leverage those resources, and I would say more than leverage them, we try to amplify and magnify those resources in community, provide Evanstonians with the things that they need, the supports that they need through our grantee partners, but also through some of our program work to give everyone an opportunity to thrive.
Marroquín: So that makes sense to me given the role of bringing people together, maybe from all walks of life. Given our topic, I think for any student of public policy it’s crucial to understand who the stakeholders are, who maybe is driving a policy and who has a seat at the table and who doesn’t. So that’s why I think it’s crucial to understand the role of foundations. And there’s this great book by a guy named Joel Fleishman. He’s a professor at Duke. It’s called The Foundation, where he makes the case that foundations are full of paradoxes. So, for example, he says foundations should be free and autonomous to fulfill their mission of improving society. And yet because of their tax status or just the special privileges they enjoy, they must also somehow be accountable to society. And then another paradox he mentions is foundations can be influential in advancing the public interest, and yet many Americans remain largely unaware of what they do and how they do it. So given your experience, also having worked across many sectors, what stands out to you about the impact that community foundations specifically have? What’s unique about them?
Anderson: The number one thing that’s unique about community foundations, that really sounds like a simple thing, but I think it actually plays out really interesting in community. The community foundations raise funds to create an endowment to exist in perpetuity to serve the geographic area from which those funds are collected. So traditionally, you’ll see a lot more foundations might come from the wealth of one single family, and they endow a certain portion of that or might come from a large corporate gift. But most community foundations raise their money from a number of residents across the community, sort of do that on a continual basis, really more so than other foundations might, with the idea that those funds then get reinvested back in the community. And I think what that means from a practical perspective is that we’re a lot more deeply connected from my perspective, we’re more deeply connected to the communities that we serve than a lot of other foundations. All foundations, when you hold money like we’re small to mid-size community foundation, we’re about high $30s, low $40s in the millions of assets. We have some funds coming in. So, I do know the numbers, but we have some funds coming in that we’re bringing in that will change our endowment size a little bit. But still, that’s small next to another community foundation in our area, Chicago Community Trust that has much more than that amount. We’re much smaller than them. But that’s still like a lot of money. And so, we have to wrestle with like being an ivory tower institution. All foundations do. Because once you get that sort of money and it’s endowed in a way that you’re going to kind of always be around, it becomes difficult going back to my community-based nonprofit days where you’re scuffling every day just to make enough money to keep the lights on. This is a different game.
Anderson: But I do think that community foundations, particularly smaller to mid-size ones, sort of tend to draw people from the community, within the community. This is just my interpretations from how I’ve worked with community foundations in the past as a fundraiser for nonprofits and also as a leader, I see a lot more people who work at the Evanston Community Foundation who live in Evanston who are invested in this community in a different way. Like even myself, I live here. So, the work that we’re doing means something for my son. There’s like a level of investment that I have there that goes beyond the grants that we’re making. The relationships that we have with the other institutions and community are incredibly important. And by virtue of the resources that we have, the doors that get open to us by being a foundation, we have a real responsibility to stand up for the sector here in a lot of ways, for the civic sector, the community, nonprofit sectors and nonprofits in our community and the people here. We kind of have to figure out what we need to be for Evanston at any given moment in time based on what Evanston needs, to be the best place it could be.
Marroquín: I really like kind of you naming that element about sort of the ivory tower piece and just the fact that there are resources there. I kind of think about it like community foundations taking hopefully the best of both worlds from philanthropy. So still being a steward and catalyst for resources, but also remaining very connected to their community in a way that many nonprofits are. Obviously, I think you all funded on profits, but you’re also yourself very focused on a mission that isn’t about profit, that it’s about broader work in the community.
Anderson: Absolutely. It’s a really unique hybrid. And I think that coming from the background that I come from, this was the type of philanthropic work, foundation work that felt most comfortable to me. Because of that element that you mentioned, the sort of hybrid element, the tie into community and the real connection to the way the work unfolds impacts my life in a very real way and that’s meaningful to me. And that’s something I’ve always tried to bring to my work throughout my career is like a personal connection, and not that you can’t do that in a larger private or family foundation. But it feels different here than the way I sort of experienced the work of other foundations.
Marroquín: That’s great. Well, kind of along the same lines, then, given that community foundations – now kind of breaking them down a little bit – they’re considered public charities for IRS purposes. There can also be this view that they must be apolitical. Some folks may perceive that they have to be or otherwise just have to be very careful and perhaps avoid all together kind of wading into anything that resembles policy advocacy. So, given that perspective, why engage in policy advocacy at all? How do you address that concern about the role that community foundations may need to play?
Anderson: For us at ECF, community listening is very important. Another thing that I drew from our experience at LIFT, Brian that I was really glad to see here is this real orientation towards listening. So, we engage community members in our grant making process. We have community members from all walks of life who review grant applications and all those sort of things. Because Evanston has a Federally Qualified Health Center, we got a larger than average sort of allocation of ARPA, American Recovery Plan Act, funds that came here relative to our size. And we partnered with the city, with Northwestern University, a few other organizations in the community to kind of do some town halls and roundtables to get feedback from community members and community organizations, including we co-hosted the first large scale community meeting ever held in Spanish in Evanston’s history. So, we’re really proud of that. As a part of that, we engaged like 500 community residents around what people felt like were the best use of our funds and community. We have a real orientation towards listening. And I guess for me, when I look at it and I say, we’re here, we’ve raised our funds, we’ve built our endowment and community members in Evanston. We have a responsibility to those community members by virtue of our mission.
Anderson: But also, like, if we raise this amount of money from people in the community, we owe it back to them in a real way. So, if we talk to that many people and they tell us what they want and we don’t take that and do something with it, then I actually think we’re falling down on our mission. That may not be capital “P” politics. But it’s small “P” politics. And in many ways, it’s the kind of politics that mean the most to me anyway. Like, it’s just looking at people are sitting here telling you we need this, and we have the space. Evanston’s is not some huge political machine. It’s 8 square miles. It’s 75,000 people. People can walk up to the mayor on the street at the grocery store and have a conversation with him or an Alderman, Alderperson, Council member in a different way than you can in the city of Chicago, to be sure. But we still have doors open to us, and we have opportunities to sit in spaces that most of those 500 community members who spoke to us don’t. We owe it. It’s our obligation to take that and do something with it. And to keep knocking on the door and keep sitting at the table and representing that voice, because people invest in not only their resources, but their time and energy into telling us what they need. Like I said, it’s not capital “P” politics, but it’s not apolitical either. We’re supposed to be here to respond to community need. We’re supposed to hear community need, and we’re supposed to leverage not just the resources we have at our disposal, but we’re supposed to be able to bring people together to move on those things, too. Because almost no foundation in the world on its own has enough money to really fix the problems that we have in our society. So, we’ve got to leverage the various partners. And that includes governmental entities. It includes the city government. We have two school districts here, one for the elementary, middle schools, and the high school is its own district. Little bit of a funky thing here in Evanston. It’s not this kind of unique. And so, we have to work with those partners. And then Northwestern is a private university, but it’s a host unto itself. It’s a $6 billion endowment organization, one of the leading one of the foremost educational institutions in our nation. So, we have to work with them, too. They are at play when it comes to things, and we touch the community in a way that maybe those other places don’t. And so, we have to bring their voice to the table. So, for me, that’s what our policy work is about.
Marroquín: That’s great. And I love that kind of tying back to what you said about that first large-scale meeting in Spanish. I think it sounds like trying to think of new ways to really engage people. I’m sure that was a challenge during the pandemic and making sure the voices were heard. So, I don’t know if you have any sort of lessons learned or things that you’re thinking about next as far as that community engagement.
Anderson: I think that a couple of things stood out to me. So, one, we often chunk these conversations into sectors. So, we talked to the youth serving agencies, we talked to organizations and community members who were presenting the challenges specific to our Spanish speaking community members. And then we did some workforce development stuff. And then there were conversations going on amongst some of our business leaders in the community. And ultimately everybody was saying the exact same thing about what they needed. My joke was like, you go to the Chamber of Commerce or our downtown business association, and they’re like, we need more workers, we need more people. They’re talking about the labor shortage in America and all those sort of things. And then I’m sitting and listening to the conversations of community members saying we need more jobs. And so, it just struck me because I’ve really often in my career been on the community member side. That’s where my work has taken me for the most part. And so, I figured people would be saying that they needed jobs. But for the people who are the providers of jobs to be saying we need workers. And for those two conversations to be happening at the exact same time, perhaps in different locales but within the same eight square mile community, that’s a bit of a head scratcher. It’s like, why can’t we come together on that? And so, again, another opportunity for us as the foundation to bring those voices into the conversations that are happening on the other side because we’re a member organization, the Chamber of Commerce, and I sit on the board of the Chamber of Commerce here. So, I owe it to those voices that I heard to bring into that conversation. Bring those voices into that conversation as well. Because maybe another, I don’t want to speak untruthfully. But in my immediate recollection, there’s like no other nonprofit organizations at the table in the Chamber of Commerce or connected with some of our business associations. And many of those business leaders are our donors and have donor-advised funds with the Evanston Community Foundation.
Anderson: So, I get a chance to talk to them in ways that maybe the community organizations won’t. And that like I said, that really struck me during that conversation. And then just hearing how much the world, I think the voices of the people who felt unheard for decades upon decades, like there was this, and it’s unfortunate it had to come from this, but with the pandemic exacerbating all of the challenges that people were facing, and the death of George Floyd and the fight for Black lives taking place all across America, I think a lot of marginalized folks saw this crack and then kicked it all the way open. My little community-worker heart, it did my heart good to see those voices, like saying we got a chance. We got our chance to hear our voices heard, and we’re not quieting down until things change. And so that really struck me as well. I was so glad to be able to sit in the seats that I sat in professionally with LIFT, with iGrow, with ECF during the course of this two-year pandemic and all of that, two plus years now, that to hear those voices like swell and grow and pick-up steam and pick-up volume and then not let go of the space that they were able to hold and push for more, that was really powerful as well.
Marroquín: Yeah, that’s really powerful. It actually gets at another question I had for you. It’s around the long-lasting impact of what we’ve experienced up until now, especially around race equity. So, I just wanted to share with you first: the President of Georgetown, Jack DeGioia, recently hosted an event with Darren Walker. He’s the President of the Ford Foundation. And Darren Walker is well known in philanthropic circles, in part because he’s the head of the Ford Foundation, which is a very large organization. He’s challenged the wealthy to really grapple with how harmful wealth inequality is, in particular, to democracy. But there was something I was sort of struggling with that I hadn’t really noticed before. The program was titled Philanthropy and America’s Racial Reckoning. And the term racial reckoning has been used quite a bit in media and other circles the last few years. It wasn’t unique to this Georgetown event, but it kind of hit me in a new way.
Marroquín: I sort of seemed to notice in a new way because I actually thought back to something a social worker told me once really early in my career, like literally fresh out of undergrad. It was my first week on the job as an AmeriCorps member. You remember those days, being trained to work with people one-on-one, mostly around employment, people looking for jobs and accessing public benefits. And this was in 2009. It was right on the heels of the economic crash in 2008. My trainer was a social worker named Carlton. He was a Black man. He had a lot of experience in the community, had worked there for many years, really knew the community. And I’ll never forget what he said to me. He says, “I know they’re calling this a great recession, but this community has been in recession for as long as I’ve been working here. So where were the headlines then?” So, I thought about that, as I was at this event with this term racial reckoning because I was curious, what does it really mean to have a racial reckoning? Do we run the risk of it just being sort of a temporary bit of jargon? And I wanted to ask you that in particular, because I know of the work that the Evanston Community Foundation and Evanston as a community is doing on reparations and just want to think about what we can learn about this so-called “racial reckoning.”
Anderson: I think that’s a really great question. And as a Black man myself, these are questions that I’ve tossed around in my head. There’s a couple of places where my head goes. First of all, it’s impossible for me to sit here as the president of a community foundation and not say that there has been change since my grandfather was born in 1919. And even my dad being born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near the King and Anderson Plantation, which is very likely where my last name comes from. Think about the movement that has been made since his birth. But Brian, as you alluded to my own personal story has something. My dad’s one of 14 kids, and all 14 of those kids, my grandparents’ kids went to college. That opened up these doors for me. And I think about the reckoning for me is like when I was a kid, I used to think, wow, my family is like really brilliant to have this all happen. And it was a point of pride. And it still is, although not in the same way right. You’re young. Your mind sort of shifts around these things. And as I got a little older, I thought my family was really lucky to have things break like that for them, for all of those things to happen in the way that they did to open up doors for me, my cousins, my son, my nephew – my nephews – my niece, they are all spoiled to death and have so much more than we, than my brothers and I had as kids. But as I’ve gotten older to bring it back to the reckoning, I start thinking it’s really kind of jacked-up that that had to happen and break that perfectly for me to be here. Just for me to have that opportunity for all 14, my dad and his siblings, to go to college – for me to be something that to be able to reach a height in my career that I have. Where I grew up, there are certainly folks working good jobs and things like that. But we leapt over, like the average outcome for the families in the community where I grew up on the Southeast side of Grand Rapids, Michigan. And I know that’s because all of those things broke right. And so, to think about how hard it is just to get to be like middle class or upper middle class or whatever. And I look at some of my colleagues and friends, white friends who didn’t have to have that story. Like their grandparents or parents could work like labor jobs and then send them off to great schools. Because those doors and those opportunities were different for them.
Anderson: And then again, because it’s always hard for me to forget the neighborhood that I came from, I look at the outcomes of the young people that I grew up with. I have friends – kids I grew up with and went to school with – who are spending the rest of their lives in jail. Kids I grew up with who died in prison, who are strung out on drugs, and all those sorts of things. And I think that’s what gets lost when we have this conversation about reckoning. We always want to compare the outcomes of the highest achieving folks who often have, like, all these good breaks and all these lucky moments and all these sort of things happen. What we’re not talking about is the people who didn’t have those opportunities that didn’t have those things break right for them. What is their path to opportunity? And I’m here to tell you, from personal experience, it’s very limited not just from personal experience, my professional experience. I’ve seen brilliant young people who are caught up in the violence and trauma of the streets here in Chicago, where I grew up in Michigan, I’ve seen those things. And so, I know it’s not about talent because I’ve looked people in an eye and seen their brilliance. That’s where the reckoning comes from. And I think it’s how we create opportunities for those folks who don’t have doors open for them, sort of good luck and hard work, certainly, but luck and good fortune is so often a contributing factor.
Anderson: And so, I think what Evanston is trying to do with our reparations work. So long answer to a short question, but you’ve known me for a while, Brian. You know, this is how I operate. We have to come to terms on some level with the sin, the greatest sin, the original sin of our nation: The exploitation of Black labor, of Black bodies and how that dovetails into the experience of all other communities of color in America. Folks with generations upon generations of wealth in this nation, were very often able to attain that, and even people who just were able to get by so often, you were able to attain that using the blood of Black folks in America. And not only does that trap you economically in a certain space, and educationally, but also the more we understand about the brain and trauma, you get trapped sort of psychologically in some of these cycles as well that it’s really impossible to break out of unless you have some very specific, targeted, powerful interventions to kind of break this cycle of thought. And that’s on an individual level, we’re not talking about millions of Black folks in America that you have to be able to do that for. And some of that is just investing more intentionally, separately, and powerfully in Black communities. I don’t mean to exclude my other brothers and sisters of the melanated among us when we have this conversation, but if we can’t get the sin of the exploitation of Black folks right, we’re not going to fix any of this other stuff either. Because for America – and I certainly don’t want to leave out the Indigenous population of this, too, because it’s very true there as well – if we can’t get over those things, then we’re not going to fix the other ones.
Anderson: Evanston sort of has a couple of different reparations things going on. So first of all, we were the first municipality in the United States to pass reparations legislation. Our reparations program right now is specifically built around providing housing to people who can prove that they had relatives, ancestors who lived in the community during a very specific time frame. And then they get somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 to support housing needs, everything from repair to down payment or anything like that. And they did have to do a lottery for that because there’s not an unlimited amount of funds. Illinois recently legalized recreational cannabis a couple of years back, and so the tax revenue from cannabis is being used to sponsor this program for 10 years for $10 million. It’ll evolve into other things, I believe, but it’s pretty limited to like economic development and housing sort of spaces, because of the limitations of what municipalities can do. We have a separate fund that we’re building. We’re working with a group called the Reparations Stakeholder Authority of Evanston. It is a community group that is still seeking 501(c)3 status, so we are kind of acting in some ways as the fiscal sponsor for them. But they hold a fund with us almost like an agency fund or donor-advised fund. Typically, we charge a small fee. We are holding this without fees – we work regularly with this group, in a way that we don’t with other funds in our portfolio. And we are raising funds to build this to a fund that will be endowed forever, to be able to do more flexible reparations work. So things like cash in the hands of people, Black folks, in Evanston. That’s the thing that a lot of people in the community want. There’s a really strong case to be made for that. And then you and I have cash transfers work in our past, and we know how powerfully that can change the outcome for community members. And do things of that nature, so that gets at going back to the reckonings. How do we invest in communities to make it so they don’t have to have such a unique story like mine, to be able to sit in this seat? Somebody can just be born poor and Black and not be so likely to be trapped in that forever. In Chicago itself, you’re more likely to sort of lose economic standing from where previous generations are among Black communities than you are in any other community in the U.S. That’s Chicago, not Evanston, but the spirit of that reverberates across the community.
Anderson: There’s a lot of work to be done, but we’ve got to invest. When we really want to give people a chance to “pull up their bootstraps” then we’ve got to give them some shoes and not ignore the fact that they’ve been shoeless for generations. That’s what we’re trying to do with reparations here. There’s a long way to go, but we’re starting. Our communities of faith are really stepping up here. We got First United Methodist Church here in Evanston was the church where the first Black resident of Evanston came as an indentured servant to a couple who were members there. Their congregation recently donated $50,000 that they raised in the course of a year from the congregation. I know they’re working on this and planning to make other gifts as well. Lake Street Church, which was once First Baptist Church, just gave half of their building to Second Baptist Church which was borne by Black congregants of that church who left to start their own churches as the Black population grew and they felt marginalized. It’s happening in different ways and unique ways here. That’s what it’s got to be. There’s got to be some sacrifice to have a real reckoning.
Marroquín: Absolutely. It sounds like there’s such a remarkable history there in Evanston and just reading about some of the work going on, I’m really both inspired by it and I’ve been fascinated to sort of see the debates, the sort of disagreements amongst friends sometimes that happened with this notion of tackling a very specific component of the effects of slavery and the intergenerational trauma around housing. Housing is so central to that, and yet it’s not just that. It’s not just wealth building through housing. I think, part of what it sounds like you’re saying is that at the community foundation – and I’m sure others like the church have been a part of asking that question – of how can Evanston and how can all of us really think more broadly about the work, make it long-lasting so that we maybe actually do fully honor this idea of reckoning that it’s not just a temporary thing.
Anderson: Right. Absolutely. An important piece of the reckoning is to not assume that you can do one thing that everybody’s going to accept and go on. Because that’s another piece of it too is that we felt like when we did this one thing, why haven’t all Black people moved forward? We have affirmative action, so why? It’s because there’s not one single solution. You think about the various mechanisms of oppression that were used on Black folks and other people of color in this country, to say we’re going to fix that by one type of fix doesn’t actually get at how deep and devious the oppression was. You’ve got to create multiple options. You got to listen to people for what the need. Some people might have a home and not need that and might just say, “I have a home, and I have these things going, but what I need is X”. It might be cash in hand. It might be I want somewhere to take my children, where I can show them the powerful history of Black folks in Evanston and help them feel like a sense of pride about it and know that they can be those things as well. That could be a piece of it for some people to like in cultural arts space or educational spaces. We got to listen to all that. Let’s have dynamic solutions to deep and complicated and complex problem that we’ve had, and not just in Evanston but all over the nation.
Marroquín: Absolutely, thank you Sol. I really appreciated that. I think I’m running out of time here, so I wanted to make sure we got one more question, and given that this is a public policy review, we have lots of Georgetown students that want to have an impact on the world. I wanted to ask what advice do you have for policy students or really for anybody that wants to impact change and is perhaps intrigued by this community foundation or foundation work? How can they enter the field, and how can they make change?
Anderson: I have two pieces of advice or recommendations from “Sol’s perspective”. Both of them I’ve kind of alluded to earlier. The first thing I’ll say is you really need to listen if you’re going to affect positive change. And I say this even as someone who grew up in a working-class neighborhood, LMI neighborhood, right? I went to college, went to graduate school, and have built this career that I’m proud of. I’ve created opportunities for the future of my family through that. I don’t even know what the people who live on the block I grew up in are dealing with today, because I’m not there anymore. And I moved out of that sort of level of challenge by virtue of the work I’ve done, so even if I wanted to go back home and do something different, I can’t say I’m going to fix Ballard Street from what I knew twenty years ago when I moved out after I graduated from college. I have to listen first, and for folks who don’t have that experience you’ve got to listen doubly hard and pull your own perspective out and not say I’m going to listen to this and I’m going to fix it with my perspective, because I know. Because I went to Georgetown, or I went to XYZ school, that’s not what listening is about. Listening is about hearing people and processing what they’re saying and building things around what they say that they need because if you’ve never gone hungry, you haven’t slept under a viaduct, or slept in an abandoned building or anything like that, then you can’t tell people what poverty is all about regardless how smart you are. That’s just the way it is. So, listen first.
Anderson: The second piece I would say is that sometimes the politics of human interaction can be just as powerful as the capital “P” politics and the things that happen in state legislatures or at the federal level or municipal government and those sort of things. Helping to support people, taking that listening, and developing local initiatives that just make life and communities a little bit easier. If you’ve got a food desert, you might want to work with the city to get zoning change, to get some tax abatements, bring a grocery store to the community. But in the meantime, you can find a lot and try to start a farmers’ market or try to start a community garden in there that can feed the neighborhood. Things like that can be steps on the way to the ultimate solution, so it can’t just be a policy change or bust. It’s got to be building the community, strengthening the community, engaging with the people in the community, listening, doing what they say needs to be done, and then taking steps to get to the ultimate solution. It’d be great if everybody had an organic grocery store that was affordable relative to the median income in the community. Until then, there’s other ways that you can make those solutions happen. I think wherever you really jump in on that spectrum is fine. Like some people want to do the community organizing grassroots, build the farmers market, build a community garden. Some people want to work with the legislators in their respective legislatures and make that stuff work. But those answers have to come together, regardless of what size you work on. It’s all powerful that’s all important, but you got to talk to each other and talk to the community to really make it work in way that’s going to elevate the community in a way that you care about.
Marroquín: Thank you, Sol. It’s always a pleasure. I always feel inspired and motivated by not just seeing what you’re doing but connecting with you. So, God bless you, and thank you for joining us today.
Anderson: Same to you, my friend. Always, always a pleasure to have some time with you, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for you for a very long time, and I’m always here whenever you need me.
Marroquín: Thanks so much, Sol.
Anderson: Yeah, all right. Take it easy.
Marroquín: Thank you for listening to today’s episode.
To learn more about the work of the Evanston Community Foundation, please visit: www.evanstonforever.org.
To learn more about the Georgetown Public Policy Review, including to see a library of previous episodes, please visit: www.gppreview.com.
This is Brian Marroquín, signing off.
[Episode Ends]
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.
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