he year 1970 was not, by most counts, a good one for the American people. The tragic and seemingly endless war in Indochina continued to rob us of our young and of our treasure

Unemployment increased by two million from January to December. Interest rates reached record heights and, only at year's end, began somewhat to abate. The cost of living soared The tax burden on individuals was increased in almost every community in the country. The buying power of the average working family was lower at the end of the year than at the beginning.

The public school system in many places was approaching a state of chaos Medical care became more costly and less accessible. Racial discrimination in all its vicious aspects continued to plague us Pollutants befouled our air and water and land. Ugliness encroached on our lives and deafening noise assaulted our senses. Above all, there was a deepening malaise induced by a growing sense of hopelessness and powerlessness, a general feeling that somehow society had got too big and too involved for any individual to control or seriously affect, that the machines-or machine-like institutions - had taken over, without consulting the people and without receiving their consent.

And in 1970, as always in a period of national distress, it was the poor who suffered the most. Without the skills, the knowledge, the access to power, it was upon them that the burdens fell most heavily.

Even their national government seemed to be against them. A program of family assistance, which would have

been an important first step in modernizing our antiquated welfare system, was mutilated by a Senate committee and its enactment made impossible.

A historic bill that would have provided hundreds of thousands of jobs in public service work was vetoed by the President.

Even moderate improvements in the Food Stamp program were denied the poor and the new legislation was made more punitive than the old.

If there was any hope for these Americans as 1970 ended, it was in their increasing awareness of the need to organize themselves to deal more effectively with the institutions which control their lives.

For they learned in the 1960's-from a combination of government-sponsored programs that required local involvement and from television that only those who banded together in common effort were able significantly to change their communities.

They learned, too, that to exercise power for the benefit of the community, and to meet the day-to-day responsibilities that such power imposed upon them, required the help of persons skilled in the many fields of social and economic action.

The Center for Community Change was organized to provide just such assistance

To achieve its objectives, the Center charted three basic missions: to provide technical assistance on a wide variety of programs aimed at bringing about genuine economic and social change among the poverty-stricken in urban and rural America, to intervene on behalf of

local groups of the poor with private and public institutions which have power and resources, and to focus national attention on issues dealing with human poverty and deprivation.

Wha

hat CCC did in carrying out these three missions in 1970 is spelled out in detail in the report of the activities of the 12 local organizations associated with the Center.

None of these missions is independent of the others. All are closely related.

Construction of low-income housing by a local community organization, for example, requires much more than the expression of a desire.

The group must first see housing as an urgent need of the people it represents. It must bring to the task the energy and the commitment necessary to make the project successful.

Such a program might well require the formation of a company, controlled by the community, to employ and train members of the community in the actual construction of the units. It could mean establishment of a housing corporation, again controlled by the community, to own and sell or rent or perhaps even manage the complex.

To do all these things requires extensive legal, architectural and planning services, knowledge of where housing money can be had, the writing of proposals to get these funds and, of course, extensive negotiations with the agencies that have the funds It means intervention on behalf of the local organization with city, state and Federal agencies, or with such private organizations as banks and other lending institutions it may even be necessary to bring before national or regional audiences the shocking lack of housing programs available to the poor.

poor will have control of successful enterprises which are visible and a source of pride, of services which are vital to the well-being of the people who live there. Moreover, such a community will be able to get improved public services and will be able to attract major infusions of resources from private and public institutions, resources which will create jobs and improve the lives of the residents.

Beyond the specific and obvious benefits that will accrue to the poor- the jobs that will be created, the health care services that will be rendered, the homes that will be built they will gain a new confidence, a knowledge that they have the power to negotiate successfully with the larger institutions, public and private, whose decisions affect their lives and their futures.

Technical Assistance The activity which absorbs the greatest proportion of the resources of the Center is the delivery of technical assistance to local organizations. To do so requires a combination of staff skills covering economic development, legal services, financial and administrative management staff training, housing and urban development, manpower training leadership development, community organization, education, research and communications

The Center's work with the Watts Labor Community Action Committee in Los Angeles serves to illustrate the wide variety of services offered and the soundness of CCC's coordinated delivery system

CCC began by helping WLCAC establish a legal structure for its economic development activities A new, nonprofit corporation, controlled by WLCAC was formed. It was the Greater Watts Development Corporation

A Greater Watts Enterprises Corporation, or GWEC, was organized with the majority of stock held by the development corporation, with the remaining shares sold to individuals This second corporation became the holding company for economic ventures by WLCAC

CCC then helped WLCAC determine the feasibility of various economic development possibilities. Many were considered by WLCAC before it finally decided that the acquisition of supermarkets in the Watts neighborhood offered greater benefits to the people of Watts and the members of WLCAC

When the decision was made, CCC worked with WLCAC to secure financing This involved extensive negotiations with the Alliance for Labor Action, the Small Business Administration, the Bank of America and the Occidental Life Insurance Company CCC then participated in the final settlement with the owners of the markets.

Once the supermarkets were purchased, the Center designed a program for submission to the United States Department of Labor which, when approved, began to train people from all over Watts to work in personnel, sales and clerical jobs in the supermarkets

The Center now works with WLCAC to teach and develop skills in management, accounting and cost-control procedures so the markets can be run efficiently and profitably

All of this, of course, involved only one activity of WLCAC in which CCC provided technical assistance The same is true of other local community organizations associated with CCC All have a large number of programs and projects beyond those mentioned in this report. In addition, each project mentioned while perhaps sounding simple enough to carry out in fact required extensive assistance from many sections of the Center

munity control of the program and in winning support for the project at the national level

The override of the Governors veto of communityoperated Head Start programs in Mississippi by the Secretary of Health Education and Welfare required the compilation of a record the mobilization of private and public forces and the preparation of a law suit

The Hubbard Street project of The East Los Angeles Community Union, the first FHA-insured, low-income housing in that Mexican American community, came as a direct result of intervention by CCC.

National Issues It is CCC's charge also to identify national issues based on needs and problems encountered by local organizations and to develop strategies to deal with them.

The Center has helped expose both the widespread hunger and malnutrition that plague the poor in America and the plight of migrant workers and their families.

During 1970, he Center also provided basic, nonpartisan research on family assistance, public service employment for the chronically jobless, day care, the school lunch program, Food Stamps and welfare reform

In cooperation with other groups concerned about these issues the Urban Coalition, the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition, the Washington Research Project, the Project on Corporate Responsibility, the Agri

Intervention

Experience in the second mission of CCC, to ensure that government programs are responsive to community needs and to intervene on behalf of organizations of the poor, has demonstrated the necessity of bringing to bear a variety of skills to solve specific problems

The award of $369,750 by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to the United Farm Workers Cooperative in Toppenish, Washington, was made possible by CCC assistance in the development of the proposal for a Migrant Health Program, in building community support, in overcoming local and state opposition to com

The Operation
Of the
Center

The Center for Community Change is a non-profit corporation exempt from income taxes under Section 501c(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. CCC is governed by a board of directors, its activities carried out under the direction of the Center's president, assisted by

officers and staff members who possess a wide range of specialized skills

In the year 1970, the Center received a total of $2,061,539 57 to carry on its activities. Of this amount, $1,511,135 55 was supplied by the Ford Foundation to support basic administrative costs of the Center and to enable CCC to provide a wide variety of services to affiliated local community organizations.

Of the total amount of funds, $494,144 56 was raised specifically for programs operated by the Center in the fields of manpower training, housing and urban planning, economic development, legal services and the like. The sources of these monies are identified in the audit which appears later in this report.

b

eyond all of this, the Center has raised, from its formation through mid-1970, more than $16 million which went directly to CCC affiliates for their various programs

Local organizations, with CCC assistance, have developed some 50 business enterprises which have an aggregate gross operation in excess of $50 million annually. The Center has helped these groups develop 1,200 units of housing costing more than $24 million. It is expected that an additional 1,500-2,000 units will be developed in 1971.

These are the statistics. But the activities of the Center for Community Change cannot be evaluated by figures alone. They must be measured by the distance that community organizations of the poor have come in meeting the problems that confront them and by the impact they have had on the structure of their communities. By this measurement, too, the Center for Community Change has made a contribution of value.

The Woodlawn Organization

a

ghetto has been described as a place where the poor live because they have no other choice. Until 1967, it was generally recognized that the Woodlawn section of Chicago- the southeast central area of that city- was a ghetto by every standard.

But then the work of The Woodlawn Organization, started in 1960, began to pay off From that time, there was a change. People who had a choice to live and work elsewhere began to move in

Woodlawn is not Beverly Hills. Far from it. It's a big city slum, pure and simple. But it is changing.

As a result of TWO there is new housing, a far-reaching economic development program, day-care and Head Start centers, education projects, and soon, a new health center which will take care of the medical needs of 10,000 poor Chicagoans in the Woodlawn neighborhoods.

The Center for Community Change has been closely associated with TWO since the Center was organized. CCC assistance began with a small "seed" grant. Then the Center helped generate funds from both government and private institutions gave technical assistance on housing and urban planning, on the development and operation of a number of businesses.

TWO has developed and controls a housing complex of 501 new units and 84 rehabilitated units. The year 1970 saw the first full year of operation of this program In the summer and fall of 1971, ground-breaking will

take place for the construction of an additional 410 units for low-income people in Woodlawn

TWO is a mature highly sophisticated "organization of organizations," with a solid record of community development activity. Currently, 144 block, religious and neighborhood groups are affiliated with TWO

The Woodlawn Organization operates an innovative manpower training program (which has "graduated" some 3,000 residents and has placed an additional 4,000 in goodpaying jobs), an experimental educational project for area youngsters from the first grade through the 12th (more than 6,000 children have completed the TWO-sponsored program), a shopping center with 14 retail establishments (including a TWO-controlled supermarket), a service station, a weekly newspaper, a motion picture theater, a security service for neighborhood merchants and, of course, the necessary counseling for people in the neighborhoods.

It is on this last that the basic philosophy of TWO comes through people with problems who contact TWO are not simply referred to public or private agencies for help. The Woodlawn Organization takes up the problem itself with whatever source of power is involved, a landlord or a bank or utility company In the doing, TWO uses both the grievance and its solution as tools to further the organization of the Woodlawn community.

Colonias

del Valle

C

olonias del Valle, literally the valley colonies, is an organization made up of a string of rural ghettos in the fertile Rio Grande Valley of southeastern Texas.

Formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Beulah in 1968, Colonias has grown to include more than 2,000 Chicanos in its ranks, residents of 23 separate communities in the valley.

Poverty, repression, bad housing, a lack of public services, poor schools, few jobs- these form the mosaic of life for the Americans of Mexican descent who live in the valley.

The flat, sunburned land of southeastern Texas produces some of the finest crops grown anywhere in the world. But the people who pick the grapefruit and the melons and the cotton earn generally less than 75 cents for an hour's work. In a few crops, picked under a rigid incentive system, earnings can reach as "high" as $1.15 an hour.

When they are not working-it is estimated that unemployment among the region's farm laborers is higher than 50 per cent people of the Colonias live off public assistance, which provides little more than survival

rations.

In its first associations with Colonias, the Center for Community Change made small, direct grants and provided community organizing and legal assistance. Using Federal funds, CCC hired a manpower specialist to help Colonias in its job-training activities. It helped draft a proposal to the Federal government for funds to give the organization support it needed to plan its organizing and economic development efforts. That planning grant of $97,000 from the Office of Economic Opportunity has been used to design several activities Colonias- members feel are most needed.

The first result of the OEO planning grant emerged in 1970 when Colonias contracted with a Chicano food

processor in the valley to clean and ship okra, peppers and other vegetables Under the plan, Chicano farm workers will pick the crops, as always, but members of Colonias will perform all the work in the sheds. After payment of a fee to the owner, Colonias del Valle will realize the profits.

The organization hopes through this project to aggregate enough capital to start other activities, which if all works well, will provide jobs and community-controlled resources to aid the poverty-stricken of the valley.

The East Los Angeles Community Union

est in the United States-as is the rate of heroin addiction. Businesses there are owned by absentees, who siphon off money spent in the community. The public school system is overcrowded, the homes are antiquated, obsolete and in many instances, just plain dilapidated

Physically the community is isolated in a sea of concrete with a lacework of freeways cutting it off, culturally and economically, from the more affluent areas that surround it.

This is East Los Angeles, an urban island with few resources and little hope. It is inhabitated mostly by Americans of Mexican descent. About 275,000 Chicanos live in East LA.

To organize this community, to give it life and meaning and identity, the Chicanos formed The East Los Angeles Community Union in 1968.

The Center for Community Change has worked with TELACU from its formation. Direct grants, technical assistance on generation of funds, housing and urban planning, manpower training, economic development - all

of these and more were provided by CCC in its work with the group.

TELACU, by the end of 1970, had set up an operating structure which included an economic development division-a profit-making entity-which operates a service station, mattress factory, a building maintenance service. It was this division that in 1970, with CCC assistance, raised $1.3 million from government and private sources to assist Chicano businessmen in the area.

TELACU also controls a profit-making construction company which is nearing completion of the first FHAsponsored, low-income housing units in East Los Angeles. This arm of TELACU will soon be called on to build housing under a new program, also planned with CCC architectural and legal assistance.

There are manpower training programs teaching Chicano young people the skills they need to enter the job market successfully.

And all of this is controlled by the Chicano community through TELACU.

Its goals haven't changed since the group organized: capital formation, self-determination, the creation of an East Los Angeles system in which the inhabitants can meet their basic needs, become economically independent and can influence decisions made by the larger institutions in the greater Los Angeles community.

There is nothing unique about the central ward. The area has all the classic problems of the ghetto hideous slums, dreadfully overcrowded classrooms in ancient school buildings, a low level of municipal services, high unemployment, large groups of very old people and, above all, widespread despair about the future

The central ward, where the disastrous riot of 1967 occurred, has the largest concentration of drug addicts in the state. The symbol of success on the streets is the pusher, the pimp, the agent of the underworld.

When NICU started in 1966, it saw its first goal as providing jobs. It arranged with employers in North Jersey to place NJCU trainees in good-paying jobs. More than 600 persons went to work as a result of this single project.

The next move was to develop an expanded manpower training program. With assistance from the Federal government, Black employers in the area and local building trades unions, training in the construction crafts was begun for young people in the ward. At the end of 1970, more than 80 were enrolled in this activity A new grant from the government, received late in the year, has brought an additional 150 into the program

During 1970 also, NICU branched out, began to increase its community organizing efforts and enlarged its goals to include economic development, provision of legal and health services, the operation of day-care centers for children of working parents (NJCU operates the largest center in the state of New Jersey), the direct employment of senior citizens.

The Center for Community Change early-on provided grants and extensive technical assistance to NICU. Management services personnel set up NJCU's bookkeeping and administrative system, then trained NJCU members to take over these tasks.

CCC aided in drafting proposals both to private and public agencies, helped win grants to set up the manpower training programs. A Center staff member pro

vided continuous assistance throughout 1970 in community organizing and trained two NICU members in techniques and methods that could be used to bring the community closer together.

The crowning achievement in 1970 was the establishment of a new health center which will, in a few months, provide a full range of medical care to some 10,000 persons in the central ward The facility was opened in the first month of 1971 and already 1,000 persons are enrolled.

NJCU's health center has the back-up support of the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, conducts paramedical training for people of the area, and has four community aides in the field at all times, engaged in health education and in explaining to the residents of the ward the benefits available through the health center.

Mississippi Action for Community Education

-he Delta Region of Mississippi, a

the

vast alluvial plain in the west cen

tral section of the state, has some of the richest soil and poorest people on the North American continent.

The human poverty and degradation are of a scale to beggar the imagination The statistics of privation are a grim litany of neglect, social injustice and repression

Of the 100 poorest counties in the United States, 24 are in Mississippi, 14 of them in the Delta. Median annual income for the 14 range from $1,260 in Tunica, lowest of any county in the nation, to a "high" of $2,285 in Leflore It is here, among the poorest of the poor, that Mississippi Action for Community Education was formed in

1968.

MACE's primary charge is to provide technical assistance to county groups of poor Blacks.

Such assistance covers programs to train local people for jobs; to equip them to provide counseling serviceswelfare, Food Stamp entitlement, health care and legal aid -so desperately needed by the people of the area; working out legal problems involved in setting up economic enterprises, and help in the actual management of the businesses.

The Center for Community Change helped the people of the Delta organize MACE CCC provided grants and legal services, help set up programs to teach job and management skills and provided know-how in planning and establishing businesses.

Through its economic development arm, the National Council for Equal Business Opportunity, CCC gives continuing assistance to MACE as it works to expand its operations in the Delta.

Currently, MACE has more than a score of young people in training as community counselors, has established a farmers' cooperative where the poor of the area can buy seed, fertilizer and other farm necessities at reasonable prices, provides on-the-spot advice aimed at solving the problems of the rural poor and has helped set up a string of "superettes", small self-service grocery stores owned by the county community organizations.

employment at 50 per cent or higher), it had to manufac ture products that could be sold elsewhere The simple shortage of dollars in the poverty-stricken Delta made