THIS POWER COUPLE WORKS TO EMPOWER CITY OUT OF POVERTY
The young married couple with two small children have lived in Soulsville near iconic Stax and historic Elmwood for half a dozen years.
Eric attended LeMoyne-Owen College just down the street and once worked for its community development corporation.
He helped to redevelop the Memphis Slim House.
Lori raised money to turn a vacant lot at the corner of Mississippi and McLemore into a tiny park under a new “I Love Soulsville” mural.
The two young professionals got to know their neighbors — a retired teacher, a retired physician, a woodworker, a mechanic.
They walked the historic neighborhood countless times and gathered with neighbors to discuss its assets and dream about its revival.
They had their own dreams of expanding their two-bedroom bungalow to make room for their growing family.
They couldn’t get a bank to give them a loan. The neighborhood isn’t a good investment, they were told.
Now they’re buying a home in Central Gardens. “I guess it’s ironic,” said Eric Robertson. “It’s ridiculous,” said Lori Robertson. It’s a perfect illustration of the monumental challenges facing this city and people like the Robertsons who are working every day to lift it out of poverty.
‘The power couple’
Eric Robertson is president of Community LIFT, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to revitalizing distressed neighborhoods.
He’s also president of River City Capital, a certified Community Development Financial Institution dedicated to injecting more capital into disinvested neighborhoods.
Over the past eight years, both organizations have awarded millions of dollars in grants and loans to groups and businesses in distressed neighborhoods just like Soulsville.
Lori Robertson is chief communications and engagement officer for United Way of the MidSouth, now dedicated to organizing a “network of care” for individuals and families mired in poverty.
United Way’s new “Driving the Dream” network aims to help the tens of thousands of Memphians living in poverty move from crisis to selfsufficiency in neighborhoods just like Soulsville.
“Eric is sort of working at the macro level — building the city by rebuilding, revitalizing neighborhoods, and revising policies that impede that work,” Lori said.
“I’m sort of working at the micro level — helping rebuild and revitalize families and individuals. Obviously, it’s going to take both approaches to move the needle on poverty in Memphis.”
As Ruby Payne, Phil DeVol and others have documented, poverty isn’t merely the result of individual behavior and circumstances.
It’s also the product of community conditions, exploitation, and political and economic
structures.
Community conditions that prevent even college-educated professionals from getting a home improvement loan.
Exploitation that makes it easier for people in those neighborhoods to get predatory payday or car title loans with 300 percent interest.
Conditions created and exploitation supported by generations of political and economic policies and structures. Slavery and segregation. Redlining and blockbusting. Race-based zoning and lending. Subprime and predatory lending. Deindustrialization and suburbanization.
“Eric and Lori are investing themselves in building and empowering communities, and in building opportunities to advance individuals out of poverty by creating economic development and economic self-sufficiency,” said Dr. Kenneth Robinson, president and CEO of United Way of the Mid-South. “They epitomize the best definition of a ‘power couple.’ “
Ways out of poverty
Eric grew up in South Memphis and Whitehaven. He never thought about going to college.
After he graduated from Hillcrest High, he applied for a job with a temp agency. They tested him by asking him to arrange boxes on a pallet.
“I figured if I could get a job making $10 an hour, I’d be set,” Eric said. “But as I was arranging those boxes, I thought there has to be more to my future than this.”
Lori grew up in North Memphis and Frayser, but her parents put her in White Station High. She always knew she’d go to college.
After graduation, she went to UTKnoxville, then to graduate school for a master’s degree, then to Washington, D.C., to work for a national nursing association.
“People tell us we could do more, make more, if we leave Memphis,” Lori said, “but it’s our home.”
After feeling boxed in, Eric followed a childhood friend’s suggestion and enrolled in LeMoyne-Owen. He helped Steve Barlow and the LeMoyne-Owen CDC work on poverty, blight and other neighborhood burdens.
He transferred to the University of Memphis and worked with the late Tim Bolding on housing and other forms of community unburdening.
“Steve and Tim helped me realize there are theories and structures behind neighborhood development,” Eric said. “There’s more to reducing poverty than helping people get food and coats.”
Lori came home in 2007 and went to work for the Greater Memphis Chamber, then Regional One, then First Tennessee. Climbing corporate ladders gave her a better view of her community’s needs.
She started a nonprofit called Brown Girls Dream, a self-empowerment program at the old Northside High that included the Memphis Prom Closet.
“No one wants to be poor, but it’s easy for the rest of us to retreat into our own lives and not see poverty head on,” Lori said. “You can’t program your way out of poverty.”
Darrell Cobbins, a board member at the Greater Memphis Chamber, said the couple are making an immeasurable impact on Memphis. “Eric and Lori are both committed, professionally and personally, to make Memphis all that it can be for every citizen,” he said.
Building wealth, opportunity
Community LIFT (Leveraging Investments For Transformation) is a product of the Greater Memphis Neighborhoods Plan, a 2008 initiative to get the county more involved in revitalizing distressed neighborhoods such as Frayser, Binghamton and South Memphis.
Eric was hired as project leader. Among the plan’s recommendations: The city needed a local nonprofit that would connect individuals and organizations already working to revitalize those neighborhoods with resources from the federal government, major foundations and corporations.
“The grassroots leaders don’t know how to get the resources they need to do the work, and the big outside funders don’t know exactly where to put the resources where they will be most effective,” he said.
Eric was hired to launch LIFT. It didn’t take him long to realize even more was needed to transform neighborhoods overwhelmed by generations of crime, blight, dysfunction and disinvestment.
“Why have we not been able to transform any of these areas?” Eric said. “The city and county have been working on this in way one or another for 40 years. Why has it not been done?”
The Robertsons and their respective organizations are working on the why.
For Community LIFT, the answer lies in building wealth, not just reducing poverty.
“The people and organizations in distressed neighborhoods don’t have the capital they need to build equity, to start their own businesses, to transform their own communities,” he said.
That’s why he started River City Capital. Larger lending institutions provide the capital, and River City directs grants and loans to small businesses and residents working to revitalize their own neighborhoods.
He’s also working to encourage the city and county leaders to focus their development priorities and policies on the most distressed neighborhoods.
“We’re talking about the destructive impact of generations of disinvestment,” Eric said. “It’s like some of these neighborhoods have been hit by a slow tornado that over decades has caused billions of dollars in damages.”
For United Way, the answer to why lies in seeing poverty not as a character flaw to be enabled or changed, but as a condition that can be treated and prevented.
Too many social welfare programs expect the people with the fewest resources to navigate, more or less on their own, too many different and complex systems of health care, human services, government and education.
“Over the years, I’ve come to see that it’s commonly not the people themselves who get stuck in poverty, but the many conditions that engulf them that tend to lock them in poverty,” Kenneth Robinson said.
That’s why United Way launched Driving the Dream. The idea is to leverage the area’s vast network of public and nonprofit human services providers to create a network of care for individuals and families mired in poverty.
Both approaches assume that people don’t want to live in poverty, and don’t want their children to live in poverty.
Both assume there is expertise and resources to help families and neighborhoods lift themselves out of poverty.
Both assume poverty is both individual and systemic.
“Economic development is about more than the recruitment and expansion of companies,” Eric said. “We need economic development that addresses the needs of all citizens in all neighborhoods.”
“We are two highly educated, wellcompensated people,” Lori said. “If we couldn’t get what we needed in that neighborhood, imagine how hard it is for people who don’t have our advantages.”