Neighborhood Matching Fund Program

The keynote speaker for the Dallas Homeowners League BootCamp 2007 was - in simplest terms - an amazing man from Seattle.

Let me quote from Jim Diers' biography, found on his website...

Participatory democracy has been Jim Diers' preoccupation and his career for the past 30 years. In his work with grassroots community organizations, with the nation's largest health care cooperative and with city government, Jim has found ways to get people more involved with their communities and with decisions that affect their lives.

In 1988, Mayor Charles Royer appointed Jim to direct Seattle’s new Office of Neighborhoods. Jim was reappointed by the subsequent mayors, Norm Rice in 1990 and Paul Schell in 1998. By the end of Jim’s 14-year tenure, the four-person Office had grown into a Department of Neighborhoods with 100 staff.

The BootCamp presentation focused on Neighborhood Matching Fund programs in Seattle, followed by a workshop on how to bring the concept to Dallas.

A Neighborhood Matching Fund is a program where community groups of all types, sizes and backgrounds, apply for the funding of projects they organize, manage, volunteer time and effort (sweat equity) and retain ownership. Funds cannot be used for staff, offices, or employees.

Jim is the author of the book - Neighborhood Power - Building Community the Seattle Way (click here for Amazon.com link); BelmontNA has a copy in its library.

Quoting from his book -

The Neighborhood Matching Fun has been surprisingly successful at what it set out to do: build community, both physically and socially. Through the program, the city provides funding in exchange for the community's match of an equal value in cash, volunteer labor, or donated goods and services in support of citizen-initiated projects.

From $150,000 in 1989, the program grew to $4.5 million by 2001, a year in which it supported more than four-hundred neighbrhood based-projects.

Not only are the projects transforming the physical appearance of the neighborhoods, but they are building a stronger sense of community by involving thousands of people from all walks of life.

The program has also yielded additional resources, numerous innovations, and new partnerships between communities and city government.

Projects are just that - short, time-spec'd events that have a clear start date and a clear end date. You cannot reapply for funding a project, and there are limits to how many times and how often you can submit a project. Funding cannot be used for offices, staff or amenities.

A project can range in size from $1,000 to buy an apple cider maker so that the apples falling from trees don't go to waste (with the sales funds going back into the community) or as large as a thousands of dollars for a troll statue underneath an overpass, replacing a unofficial trash and waste dump.

In Seattle, the Neighborhood Matching Fund has more than doubled the City’s $45 million investment while involving tens of thousands of volunteers in completing more than 3,000 community-initiated projects since 1989.

The Dallas Homeowners League is organizing the first round of grassroots efforts needed to design and present this concept to the Dallas City Council. But the nature of this program - openness, public input, and no limits on who can participate - will require that DHL not be the sole manager of the effort.

In fact, many of us will demand the DHL open the process to the public and other organizations in Dallas so a comprehensive program can be developed.

During the BootCamp, Mr. Diers presented the fundamentals of a Neighborhood Matching Fund. That 35-minute presentation was recorded on videotape. But since Mr. Diers is one of those effusive speakers who cannot stand behind a podium, he was barely on camera.

A workshop focusing on the top issues in organizing a Neighborhood Matching Fund followed the presentation.

Everyone who participated in the workshop has agreed to be part of the nucleus of the campaign to bring a Neighborhood Matching Fund to Dallas.

Meeting Notices

Saturday, September 22, 2007: 9 - 10:30 am, Beilharz Carriage House, behind 2800 Swiss Avenue @ Texas Street in the Wilson Historic District just east of Downtown Dallas (small yellow building on Texas Street behind the house at the corner of Texas and Swiss Avens

Wednesday, September 26, 2007: 630 - 800 pm, DHL General Meeting, Bath House Cultural Center at White Rock Lake (review of Task Force discussions)

The 35-minute presentation has been divided into four audio segments only and posted on YouTube. The four clips are included at the bottom of this column.

If you wish to participate in the development of this amazing concept, click here to send an email to the Dallas Homeowners League board (this is a forwarding email address using the domain name NeighborhoodMatchingFund.com).