Summit encourages using Catholic social teaching when investing

Leading with faith can help create the kind of development that sustains rather than destroys existing communities.

That was the message delivered by leaders of the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation, who spoke Sept. 25 to participants during a two-day Catholic Social Teaching Investing Summit hosted by the Francesco Collaborative and the Catholic Impact Investors Collaborative.

The collaboratives bring together investors who want to use Catholic social teaching as the starting point in their investment decisions.

While the Lawndale corporation was started in collaboration with Lawndale Christian Community in 1987, it has been supported over the years by many individual Catholics and Catholic institutions, said Elizabeth Moriarty, who moderated the panel.

That includes three communities of women religious — the Adrian Dominican sisters, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration — who have invested a combined nearly $1 million in the corporation’s current Reclaiming Campaign, which has a goal of building 1,000 homes in North Lawndale, 1,000 homes in other neighborhoods and mixed use and commercial properties.

Its work is the legacy of Msgr. Jack Egan, who was pastor of Presentation Parish in North Lawndale when he was instrumental in helping to organize residents to form the Contract Buyers League in 1967, Moriarty said. The league worked against the exploitative system of “contract buying” homes that Black residents were forced into because banks would not give them mortgages.

That campaign is being supported by Elisse Douglass and her company, East Freedman & Main, whose mission is to support the development of communities to sustain the marginalized people who live there and help them thrive.

She came to that work, she said, after seeing successive generations of her family forced out of places that gentrified, redeveloped or sometimes were just wiped off the map.

“What would it look like if Black families could develop generational wealth by staying in the same place?” she asked. “That is why I do this work.”

Richard Townsell, who has been president of LCDC for 23 years over two stints, said Moriarty was instrumental in finding funding for LCDC from North Side Catholic parishes when he was discouraged by receiving rejection after rejection when was seeking just $5,000 to make repairs to existing rental houses the corporation manages.

At the time, “I didn’t imagine people like you existed,” Townsell told the assembled investors.

Townsell grew up in the neighborhood, two blocks from the apartment where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. briefly lived in 1966. He was there when riots wracked the neighborhood following King’s assassination in 1968, leaving scars that still exist in the form of 3,000 empty lots.

He was a student at Farragut High School when a coach started Lawndale Community Christian Church a decade later, and saw the church reach out to the community with organizations like LCDC and a community health organization. Now he is committed to seeing LCDC and the neighborhood grow together and to developing young leaders at a time when many young adults are leaving religious institutions.

“LCDC and the neighborhood of Lawndale is at a crossroads,” said Whittney Smith, one of those young leaders and LCDC’s deputy director and general counsel.

It has an opportunity to move forward, she said, but that opportunity will not last forever. LCDC is moving forward, with $125 million invested in redevelopment over its history, 230 affordable rental units created in mixed-use developments and 124 single-family homes built, 22 of them this year. It also has developed commercial space and organized worker-owned cooperatives.

All of the work is intended to improve the quality of life of people in Lawndale, she said.

“That strategy means that we focus on doing it without displacement,” Smith said. “It’s meant to build a solid, strong community and to build generational wealth. Doing this requires resources.”

Douglass’ company has helped find those resources, as it as for similar projects around the country.

“Every place we work, everyone has a dream for what they want their neighborhood to look like,” Douglass said. “But we don’t have a lot of good models. … We are very committed to this work. We don’t want to be solving the same problem in 30 years.”