Jeremiah Robinson and I had lunch today at Maria’s, billed as the best little taco place in Texas. If you’re from out of town, you won’t find it if you don’t know where it is. We were taken there by Janie Barrera. Her liftfund.com invested in the business run by Maria and her daughter Linda; it was crowded with Spanish speaking working men. It’s just one of the small businesses her fund invests in on San Antonio’s west side.
The predominantly Latino west side is San Antonio’s poorest neighborhood, but Barrera and former mayor, only the second in the city’s history, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton, Henry Cisneros, have ambitious plans for its revival, through revitalizing its business corridor and renovating houses that local people can afford. They only have to look at the east side of town, where gentrification has already priced houses out of reach of the community, to know what they want to do differently.
A local non profit-newspaper said about the Estar West project, “ An ambitious plan to revive what some call the corazón of San Antonio, a historic neighborhood characterized by both rich cultural attributes and economic decline, is unfolding alongside low-key but no less deliberate efforts to secure its past and future.”
Cisneros, who still lives in the house he was raised in on the west side, two doors down from his brother’s house, and Barrera and Olivia Travieso and her team at the oci-group.com, who is leading marketing and spearheading the coordination of the partners and stakeholders, have an eight-pronged plan to repair the economy in their neighborhood. They saw that home healthcare visits by people who had gained people’s trust resulted in more people on the west side becoming vaccinated and masking up during the pandemic. They are going to apply the same method to small businesses. “Mostly small businesses don’t have time to go find the help they need that is available, or don’t know that it’s available,” Travieso said. “So we are going to them.” That program launched just last month.
Funded initially by the Aspen Institute’s Latino’s and Society Initiative in a cohort of six cities, San Antonio has become a model, and both Miami and El Paso are borrowing pieces of the emerging, successful model of creating a thriving neighborhood economy that San Antonio has figured out. “Usually big collaborative projects rely on people to volunteer their time to knit things together; funding OCI (to play that role) was one of the smartest things we did,” said Cisneros, who is going to do a keynote at the conference.
Jeremiah and I also met with Barbara Ankmara Burford, who leads community engagement for San Antonio and the region down to the Rio Grande. That meeting went so well that she hopes to bring her counterparts from Dallas and Austin to our conference in February.
We will also be telling a really groundbreaking story of a new partnership between the local indigenous group, the American Indians in Texas (AIT), and the Pueblo tribe from El Paso, where Christine Serano has led in the creation of a successful native led CDFI that understands how to invest in indigenous people at an earlier stage of their business than the traditional white-led financial institutions and CDFIs. They are bringing their lending and business support program to AIT, the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan nation who want to add a focus on entrepreneurs to their existing social service offerings.
That inter-tribal partnership is significant for two reasons: first it demonstrates that the Pueblo have built a platform that is replicable, and second it is a partnership between urban Indians and those living on tribal lands. “Usually the tribes and Indians in the city don’t get along,” explained Ramon of AIT. More than 70% of native Americans have moved to the city, partly because it’s too hard to make a living on a reservation, partly from forced displacement. But the government support funding still goes predominantly to where the Indians used to live, now where nearly three quarters of them are now, so the two groups are unlikely allies who are finding ways to help both groups thrive.
We are meeting with Ram Gonzales whose Prosper West San Antonio is a key pillar of the Estar West plan. Gonzales is trying to raise a fund to buy commercial and city-owned, commercial space along with housing on the west side ahead of the gentrifying developers.
We left San Antonio realizing how timely our convening is, and we met with half a dozen other people I haven’t mentioned. Each of them is introducing Jeremiah, Leroy Barber, who leads faith-based relationships through our sister organization, faithfinance.net, and me to other people in our ecosystem. We will be back soon to meet those new partners and stakeholders.
It’s clear that our convening is meeting a need that people recognize. There is a lot moving in San Antonio, and we can shine a light on it, as well as bring in the practitioners with the funds and investment platforms who can show what’s possible, as well as the catalytic foundations whose philanthropic investment makes it possible.
We are grateful to the HEB Foundation, our local anchor supporter, as well as the Texas Methodist Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and Trinity Church Wall Street – all of whom are supporting our work to put on a national conference with a local focus.