How We’re Standing Up for Racial Equity.

Among the many inequities that COVID-19 has exposed, the vulnerability of people living paycheck to paycheck compared to the resilience of people with a financial cushion is one of the harshest.

Far more than income, it is wealth that allows families to break the cycle of poverty. Building wealth allows them to invest in the future – in homes, education, and business creation – and to pass the rewards of their hard work on to their children.

All our Economic Prosperity Services are targeted toward helping people build intergenerational assets. 

• Small Business Services: JPNDC has evolved a unique and comprehensive model for helping immigrants and people of color formalize, stabilize, and grow their small businesses. Business ownership, second only to homeownership, is a principal path to wealth building for people born without financial assets.
• Our innovative Constructing Wealth initiative is opening doors for small contracting businesses owned by people of color to participate in Boston’s building boom, create jobs, and build wealth for their owners.
• Our Family Prosperity Services fill a critical gap in helping people, especially new immigrants and people of color who have been poorly served by our workforce development ecosystem, to build credit, access good career ladders, and take the steps leading to financial security.
• In running one of the largest Family Childcare systems in Massachusetts serving low-income Latinx children, JPNDC invests heavily in the professional development of educators so that their work with children at the most critical stage of brain development results in school readiness and closes the racial achievement gap.

JPNDC is raising $2.67 million to build The Center for Equity and Prosperity in the Brewery space in Jamaica Plain. This Center is our investment in an inclusive city. It will allow JPNDC to partner with hundreds more families and businesses so they can stay in Boston, turning their hard work into long-term prosperity. It will work to close the racial wealth divide so that future generations are inheriting assets, not poverty.

Resources to build affordable housing are highly restricted and prioritize desperately needed rental units.

Yet we want to ensure that people have the opportunity to use their affordable home as a springboard for asset building. We are committed to:

• Expanding rent reporting. In 2019, JPNDC was one of four organizations nationwide invited to participate in a rent reporting pilot by the National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders. Participating residents of four of our affordable buildings are seeing significant increases in their credit scores just by paying rent. We will expand this opportunity to all our residents.
• Bringing other asset-building resources to our residents. We are exploring a range of opportunities that would allow residents to build credit and savings.
• Advocate for affordable homeownership housing. In the context of the housing crisis and the federal government’s disinvestment in housing over the last four decades, support for first-time affordable homebuying is grossly inadequate. We are committed to pushing for more and creative homeownership opportunities that allow low-income families to build wealth.

• In our own housing development pipeline, JPNDC prioritizes contracting with firms owned by people of color.
  • Between 2009 and 2020, 52% of our construction dollars ($81.7 million) went to minority firms. Nine percent ($14.7 million) went to women-owned businesses.
  • During the same period (2009-2020), 63% of construction workers on eight construction projects were people of color, exceeding the City of Boston’s recommendation of 50%.

• Our advocacy with public and private stakeholders to lower barriers and increase access for minority businesses is making a difference. Companies with which we contract have waived high insurance requirements and mentored contractors of color around submitting successful bids. Our Small Business Services Director now sits on the Boston Employment Commission, which monitors construction firms’ compliance with diversity hiring guidelines.

In our 2019-2023 strategic plan, JPNDC’s Board of Directors identified the Promotion of Racial Equity in All Aspects of our Work as a top organizational priority.

We embrace racial justice in committing to:

• Build a strong leadership pipeline for JPNDC’s board and staff, with emphasis on young leaders and people of color who reflect our constituency.
• Use trainings, reflection, and dialogue to deepen our understanding of institutional, structural, and cultural forces that perpetuate racism and white privilege.
• Challenge and change internal and interpersonal dynamics that impede dialogue and continue patterns of inequality or exclusion.
• Lift up the voices of people who are often not heard.
• Make JPNDC a place where conversations about race and racism are welcome and productive.
• Create an environment that helps develop the full potential of everyone associated with JPNDC, particularly people of color who bear the burden of historical patterns of discrimination.