Thriving Neighborhoods Lab

Community Ownership vs Community Input

Markos and Kirk discuss the difference between asking communities for input and giving them genuine decision-making power. They dig into why the first approach is so common, what it costs organizations and funders to share real authority, and what community ownership looks like in practice.

The Long Game - Why Transformation Takes Generations

Carol Naughton has spent more than thirty years inside some of the most consequential neighborhood transformation efforts in the country, from leading the East Lake Foundation to helping launch Purpose Built Communities in 2009, where she has served as CEO since 2020. In 2025, Forbes recognized her on its 50 Over 50 Impact list. In this episode, Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Carol for a practitioner-to-practitioner conversation about what a multi-decade commitment to neighborhood transformation actually looks like on the ground, for organizations, for communities, and for the funders who support them. They dig into what the sector gets wrong about time, what it costs the people being served, and what practitioners who want to play the long game need to understand that rarely gets said out loud.

The Inclusive Growth Paradox - Why Investment & Protection Must Go Together

Investment without protection displaces the people it was supposed to help. Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Tony Pickett, CEO of Grounded Solutions Network, to work through the central tension that lives underneath all neighborhood revitalization work. Through 35 years of building community land trusts and shared equity housing models, Tony has spent his career making the case that affordability can't be periodic, it has to be permanent. The conversation covers what displacement looks like as a threat rather than a side effect, how protection strategies get operationalized alongside investment, and what forces work against the protection side once a neighborhood starts attracting attention.

Why Holistic Approaches Outperform Single-Issue Interventions

Good work done in silos rarely adds up to transformation. Housing organizations build housing. Education groups improve schools. Workforce programs create job pathways. And yet neighborhoods stay stuck. This episode gets into why. Kirk and Markos Wester-Rivera trace the progression from outputs to outcomes to actual transformation, and make the case that reducing toxic stressors for kids and families requires addressing interconnected causes at the same time. Single-issue interventions, no matter how effective, can't get there on their own. The episode also tackles the harder structural question: what has to shift in how we fund, measure, and organize this work to make holistic approaches possible in the first place?

The Community Quarterback - Why Every Neighborhood Needs a Lead Entity

Logan Herring built REACH Riverside after seeing something that practitioners across the country quietly recognize but rarely name: a neighborhood full of good organizations doing good work can still fail to produce transformation if no one is holding the integrated strategy. In this conversation, Kirk Wester-Rivera and Logan work through what that gap actually looks like on the ground, what the quarterback role does that nothing else in the ecosystem can do, what structurally breaks down when there isn't one, and what it really costs an organization to take it on. They close with the argument practitioners can bring to funders and boards who don't yet see why a lead entity isn't optional.