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A skyline that sprouts new buildings at a dizzying pace. Neighborhoods dotted with new breweries and renovated mills. Thousands of new apartments springing up beside light rail lines. The signs of Charlotte’s booming prosperity are everywhere. But that prosperity isn’t spread evenly. And from Charlotte’s “corridors of opportunity,” it can seem a long way off, more like a distant promise than the city’s reality.

Corridors of Opportunity aims to leverage assets, not just address needs

Historic West End Partners' J'Tanya Adams (second from left) and Erin Gillespie (center), the city’s Strategy and Development Manager for Corridors of Opportunity, were part of a panel following an announcement by the Truist Foundation.
Lisa Worf
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Truist Foundation
Historic West End Partners' J'Tanya Adams (second from left) and Erin Gillespie (center), the city’s Strategy and Development Manager for Corridors of Opportunity, were part of a panel following an announcement by the Truist Foundation.

Charlotte’s Corridors of Opportunity program is not the traditional approach to economic development — instead of luring a single big business or splashy development, the city is investing $109 million of public and private funds into six parts of the city that have historically been overlooked.

When Tracy Dodson returned to the city in 2018 to oversee economic development, she has said that the city manager teased her about having to shift her focus from the “big, sexy projects” to parts of Charlotte that don't normally attract attention.

The corridors approach differs in another way, which came up following the Truist Foundation's announcement of a donation to support minority-owned businesses and workers on Monday: instead of looking at what a community lacks, it aims to size up its assets and figure out the best way to leverage them.

That’s what caught the attention of Main Street America, a Chicago-based group that helps to revitalize business districts and towns throughout the country. Main Street America has been working in Charlotte through the Knight Foundation for several years.

The nonprofit’s interim director, Hannah White, was in town this week for the announcement. She said the traditional approach has “not generated economic returns and wealth-building opportunities for local residents, particularly in communities of color.”

White said she’s been impressed with the way Charlotte collaborates with local grassroots organizations to pinpoint a community’s assets in terms of “human capital, social network and historic buildings.”

Charlotte is one of five cities that will split a $22 million contribution from the Truist Foundation as part of its "Where It Starts" initiative. Nearly $16 million will go to the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAEL. In Charlotte, the group will work with financial institutions and universities to create opportunities for people of color. Another $6 million will go toward helping strengthen small businesses owned by women and people of color, in the form of grants, loans, and guidance with things like marketing and strategy. Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, and Miami are the other cities in the initiative.

The Truist announcement was followed by a panel discussion that included J’Tanya Adams, who leads Historic West End Partners, and Erin Gillespie, the city’s strategy and development manager for Corridors of Opportunity. The two have worked closely on developing and tackling a vision for Charlotte’s Historic West End, which includes Beatties Ford Road.

Gillespie said every neighborhood deserves a place where they can access good services, transit and transportation, find a job and have fun with each other. She said coming up with that vision requires understanding “what business owners and residents and job seekers are looking for and how [the city] can connect the dots and bring that investment to them."

Historic West End Partners, Adams said, looked at “how we could go about supporting our small businesses, our legacy businesses, recruiting new small businesses to fill the service gaps.”

She said so far, the group has helped revitalize three strip malls that contain old businesses alongside new ones, most of them Black-owned.

The community is the only entity, Adams said, that can truly restore itself.

“The community understands its needs. The community is more astute … and they actually are able to implement a whole lot quicker when they have the capital made accessible to them,” Adams said.

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Lisa Worf traded the Midwest for Charlotte in 2006 to take a job at WFAE. She worked with public TV in Detroit and taught English in Austria before making her way to radio. Lisa graduated from University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in English.