October 10, 2024

Heart and Home Column by Josh Ishimatsu: The Fall of MACSA and Lessons for the Future of Community Development in Santa Clara County

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In this edition of our newsletter, we have a couple of other pieces about community development and community development corporations (CDCs) – we have Gabriel Frank-McPheter’s (one of our super interns from last summer) piece about the California Neighborhood-based Community Development Coalition and an update from SV@Home’s Community Roots Collaborative, a community development capacity building program for nonprofit organizations in the South Bay.   

As Gabe’s piece describes, there are some great, successful CDCs in the Bay Area – groups like the Unity Council, the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation, and the Black Cultural Zone CDC in Oakland; Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, Chinatown Community Development Center, and the Mission Economic Development Association in San Francisco. I am a big believer in the impact of community development and will tell anybody who is willing to listen that the lack of a CDC in the South Bay is a huge gap – a gap that SV@Home is trying to help close (like through our Community Roots Collaborative programming).  But, the bottom line is there are no established CDCs in the South Bay – no CDCs in the region’s most populous county or in its most populous city.

Why?  I have a few different answers to this question, some of which can be topics for future columns.  But, for this column, I’m going to slightly sidestep the question and say that, actually, San Jose had a CDC.  And we (the collective we of people who care about housing and justice in this region, as well as the powers that be in local government and philanthropy), shamefully, let it die.  This particular loss of the local community development capacity, for me, tells us a lot about the depth of the barriers to social justice in our region and has some important learnings for us as we build community development capacity in this region.

The MACSA Youth Center during better days (Photo Credit: The Mercury News)

The Mexican American Community Services Agency, Inc. (MACSA) was a CDC

I was never close enough to MACSA to know if MACSA considered itself a CDC.  And, full disclosure, I am not a MACSA expert and everything I know about the MACSA story is as an outside observer who followed the story in the press as it unfolded.  I know a few folks who worked at MACSA or who accessed services at MACSA and/or who had family who likewise had some direct connection to MACSA.  Chicano/a/x Eastsiders above a certain age, especially those who are in the nonprofit sector, almost surely have a MACSA connection.  And to a person, these folks speak glowingly of MACSA, the people who used to work there, and the community that was built up around the institution.  For one example, when I did a Google search for photos to grab for this column, I came across this post from an artist named Miguel Ozuna.  This is part of how I can tell MACSA was a good and worthwhile organization, despite whatever problems it may have had – its legacy and positive impact are still visible almost a decade after its doors closed and almost a decade and a half after it was severely diminished/punished.

At any rate, I don’t have a direct connection to MACSA.  And yet, as somebody who has spent the better part of 3 decades working for and with CDCs, I know a CDC when I see one, and MACSA had all the hallmarks of being a CDC:

  • Born from community activism:  In the 1960s, the original MACSA house was a hub for organizing for student strikes, for the black berets, for community and cultural publications (including for what would eventually become Lowrider magazine), and general community organizing.  Scratch the surface of almost any other CDC, and you see a similar story – a community of activists who built relationships across a number of different mobilizations and who kind of stumbled into the realization that, hey, we can build and own real estate too.  Which brings us to the next point…
  • Real estate/affordable housing development capacity:  A central defining aspect of CDCs is that they have real estate development capacity (though the scope and scale of development capacity can vary widely).  MACSA had real estate development capacity and owned/had developed affordable housing.  MACSA had completed 4 housing developments, totaling over 200 units.
  • A variety of other place-based/community-based services:  And while real estate development is a common characteristic for CDCs, you are not a CDC if you only do real estate development.  Another defining characteristic of CDCs is that they do a lot of different things.  And, at its peak, MACSA had multiple, robust lines of service, including senior, youth, family, mental health, health, and educational services.
  • Straddling the worlds of activism/organizing and the glitzy worlds of finance and philanthropy:  Real estate development, because it takes a lot of money and because it is a technical/financial field, pushes grassroots organizations in directions they might not have otherwise gone.  For good and for bad, every CDC I know has one foot in grassroots activism and one foot in the world of financial institutions, technocrats, and professional politicos – where you dress up in tuxedos and ball gowns and rub shoulders with people with money and power (see photos, below).  It can be a difficult balance to strike.  More money to serve the community is good.  Learning more technical skills is good.  But the glitz and glamor can obscure your vision.  When you have a foot in two worlds, it can become difficult to know which way to lean.  And where you ultimately ground yourself says everything about who you really are.  Regardless, navigating this dynamic tension is something that feels pretty endemic to the CDC world.  Some CDCs negotiate the tension better than others.

MACSA’s Red Carpet Night (in 2008, right before the wheels came off)

The Fall of MACSA 

During the Great Recession of the 2000s, when many, many people and firms were experiencing financial hardship, MACSA executive staff took money from restricted accounts (i.e., pension funds for teachers) to pay for daily operating expenses.  This is a huge no-no – it was unethical, illegal, short-sighted, a betrayal of trust, and a whole bunch of other bad things.  AND, as far as I understand, it was not the same level of malfeasance as embezzling the money and skipping off to mai-tais on the beach in a non-extradition, tropical country.  From my reading, it was a stupid, wrongful set of acts born from desperation to keep the doors open.  

When MACSA leadership’s transgressions came to light, the press had a field day in terms of finger-waggling judgment (see, e.g., the Mercury News column pondering whether the situation was an example of sleaze or incompetence).  And, from the bad PR, the loss of leadership, and the loss of trust and faith of funders, MACSA entered a downward spiral that led to its losing its nonprofit status in 2012 and closing its doors in 2016 (?).

Interior of MACSA Youth Center, 2023 (Photo Credit: Miguel Ozuna)

Racism towards BIPOC CBOs

Whatever the MACSA transgressions were, the need for accountability should have stopped with the leaders of the organization.  And there should have been extra care taken to see that, after the responsible leaders were transitioned out of the organization, that the organization itself was given the full support it needed to continue to serve the community at scale.  The tremendous asset that MACSA was – the positive role that the organization played in so many people’s lives – should never have been allowed to wither and die.  And the absence of MACSA continues to be felt, not just on the Eastside but across our entire region.

If there is a community asset at this scale, you do whatever you can to preserve it.  If leadership makes mistakes and does something hinky, you hold leadership accountable – executive staff, the board, etc. – but you don’t punish the community.  The inability/unwillingness to distinguish between the leaders responsible, line staff, and the community at large; the lack of nuance in describing the severity of the crime; the quick rush to judgment/punishment – this all reeks of racism for me.

There is a negative feedback loop between racism towards a community and racist perceptions of BIPOC-led community-based organizations.  Because of this, the sins of a BIPOC-led CBO redound to the community in ways that never happen for white-led and white/”mainstream” -serving organizations.  When there are bad actors for white-led/mainstream organizations, they are appropriately seen as bad apples who don’t ruin the whole bunch.  They don’t become part of a larger narrative of “hustlers,” “poverty pimps,” and “welfare queens” – a part of larger racist/sexist/sexualized narratives of criminality and the perceived pathological intractability of so-called urban ills.  As a concrete example of this double standard, if a symphony’s executive director embezzles from the symphony (as was alleged in Mercury News stories contemporaneous to the MACSA scandal reporting), you don’t call to question the entire enterprise of performing classical music, you don’t invoke narratives of arts and culture pimps, and the symphony in question gets to continue to exist.  It is just not the same level of hype with the same level of rush to judgment/desire for punishment.

What this means for us now

The cynicism and racism directed towards BIPOC CBOs in Santa Clara County feels undiminished since the fall of MACSA.  If anything, the people who hold negative/racist views of CBOs feel more emboldened to express themselves in the current environment.  So, for those of us who want to re-build community development capacity in our county and for those of us who care about social justice more broadly, I have a few calls to action arising from the fall of MACSA:

  • We need to be transparent, behave ethically, and be careful to follow the rules.  It may be unfair that we are held to a higher standard and exist under heightened scrutiny, but whatever it is, it’s there.  
  • We should have each others’ backs.  If one of us is attacked, we need to rally around each other.  Like it or not, we are all tarred by the same brush.
  • We should build a big field.  Community development capacity needs to be held by many organizations across a supportive ecosystem.  The needs are bigger than any one organization, and if one organization folds, all of our collective capacity can’t just disappear.
  • We must grow the pie.  We can’t keep fighting for crumbs – for diminishing slices of the metaphoric pie.  In the spirit of supporting each other, we need to collectively figure out how to have a bigger pie.  

In this spirit of collectivity, SV@Home has committed to convening like-minded organizations so that we can together build the resources and technical capacity for community-based development in Santa Clara County.  Stay tuned for more to come!