Listen to Your Community with Tara Barauskas of Community Corporation of Santa Monica

This week, your host, Matt Barnes, sat down with Tara Barauskas, the Executive Director of Community Corporation of Santa Monica to discuss their efforts to bring affordable housing to the area.

About Community Corporation of Santa Monica

The Community Corporation of Santa Monica has been operational for 41 years. They aim to restore, build, and manage affordable housing for people with modest means. Today, they have 91 buildings and over 2,000 apartments for lower-income households, and they are constantly working to integrate these properties into the wider community to promote diversity.

The Challenges of Bringing Affordable Housing to Communities

During her time in Community Corp, Tara has focused on finding better ways of working with the community, as often it is tough to foster relationships. She has learned that the best practice is to focus on active listening and restructuring meetings to have a short presentation followed by an extensive Q&A session.

"I've learned that the best way to work with them is to first of all listen, so we've kind of rearranged our format for our community meetings to be about 10-15 minutes of presentation and an hour of listening and answering questions, and we've just found that that's really what needs to happen."

She has also found that communities crave authenticity, so she incorporates smaller group discussions so that there can be personal interactions, which will help to understand and address any concerns authentically.

Engaging with the community can be hard when there is negative rhetoric around the people nonprofits serve. Dealing with this can be emotionally challenging and requires nonprofit professionals to have a thick skin. Platforms like Nextdoor spread misinformation about social groups, which complicates advocacy efforts.

To address this issue, Tara believes that nonprofits should be active in online spaces. They should counter misinformation, challenge the problematic rhetoric, and champion the voices of truth.

"One of the things I think about nonprofits as advocates for social justice is that we have to recognize where we are and just attack it at the source."

Want more on Community Corp’s efforts to place affordable housing in Santa Monica? 

Listen to this episode of the Nonprofit Connect podcast to hear the rest of Tara’s insights!