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STAKEHOLDER INPUT & FEEDBACK FROM EVENT SERIES Great neighborhoods marked w/ diversity, quality homes, schools, parks, and public services. We need to know the initiatives. More black leaders at the table. Decision makers. Pride in homes. But you can’t clean your way out of a dilapidated home. How do we get to the table and not just at a community meeting? Better communication about programs. Leadership is needed. How are we going to bring up our children? The Black wealth gap...through white America is substantial. It’s a big gap. So we have to say, “Okay, what do we do as a community to educate each other?” The importance of home ownership...When you could no longer legally discriminate against certain people, we saw that white flight. Those neighborhoods that were once good homes that had value, now start to lose this value, and people are leaving the neighborhoods. We’ve been dogged out strategically. Strategically, yes. But yet, we still got to remember who we are...and get together and make these things work. What is the percentage of women in business entrepreneurs? What is the percentage of African American women in business? And the numbers were astonishing, because they were very very low. So, for me, it’s just showing up. When we see our senior citizens showing up, it’s time. We need to pay attention, we need to listen because they deserve to be respected. They deserve to be invested in, in their later years of life. They have done a lot of this hard work. Blocks should not be removed, BUT, BOOSTED, revitalized, given a make-over. Put value BACK into existing communities When you think about building wealth, you need assets, right? You need financial lending. You need to be able to borrow money. Equitable...It’s fairness. Irregardless of your credit score, whatever, we weren’t allowed this access, to get the loan, to buy the loans. So, home equity, we were always left, we would never get there. The resources that we needed for equity. Past initiatives to build-up the white middle-class worked, black families were routinely prohibited. Federal gov’t created wealth for whites. Access to administrative-only things that a small business doesn’t have. If they don’t have access to capital, they can’t afford to buy those other services. If you can’t afford to buy the accounting, buy the marketing, design, all of those things... If you want people to succeed, you have to address that barrier. There are good programs. There are people who need them. But the connection and information isn’t there. We want to take you out of this poor consumer category and make you an owner and producer and entrepreneur. But we can do it collectively, we’re not saying that you become all those things...We want to take you from dependency to independency. From independency to interdepency. Dependency: you do it for me. Independency: I’ll do it for myself. Interdependency: we will do it together. When you talk about financially empowering, it’s not just about getting the youth involved, but it’s starting to teach them the skills on how to manage the money that they’re making. So, I think one of the things would be do they have a bank account setting them up. Teach them what a debit card is, how to use it. I think the jobs, getting jobs for kids is crucial. Throughout the engagement series, the City obtained direct input and feedback from residents regarding their lived experiences with wealth building and extraction. The City utilized several techniques and coordinated a mixed methods approach to capture both written and verbal feedback. This allowed the City to receive direct feedback from residents on elements of the Blueprint, including what they would like to see regarding financial empowerment and wealth building for the future. Below, find a selection of the input received at the Boosts and Blocks Discussion and Undesign the Redline Soft Launch: STAKEHOLDER INPUT & FEEDBACK FROM EVENT SERIES 16 FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT BLUEPRINT