Insights from Omar Carrillo Tinajero’s first year as Executive Director and future plans for CCI
Dear Friends,
My first year as CCI’s Executive Director has been a year of great challenges for our communities and our field. It’s also been a year in which we have persistently shown up for each other in the face of those challenges. Minnesota is our national beacon, but all over the country, I’ve seen neighbors and colleagues supporting each other through natural disasters, budget cuts, ICE incursions, and more. I am deeply grateful for the support I’ve experienced too, as the commitment and care of CCI’s partners, network, and staff have shaped my year and reinforced our shared purpose. And while it’s been a year of transitions and uncertainty, it’s also been a year of important learning.
We can all see that the community investment landscape is undergoing significant shifts. Intensifying climate disruptions, unsettled public priorities and funding environments, and strains on civic trust and democratic norms are our daily realities. In the face of these realities, we are learning together to stay present to both constraint and possibility as we adapt to our evolving circumstances and continue our critical work. Yet we also need to remember that our field has always operated amid tension and contradiction.
“This kind of work requires us to hold complexity without retreating from action” – Omar Carrillo Tinajero
Black History Month gives us an opportunity to recall, in particular, how generations of leaders built institutions and paths forward, including our community development and community investment infrastructure. When we look at this legacy, we can see the imagination, collective care, and belief in community self-determination that is our inheritance.
In the coming year, CCI will be drawing on that inheritance as we:
- Explore how community investment systems can support climate resilience and sustainability
- Support practitioners working at the intersections of housing, infrastructure, and environmental justice
- Advance community-owned real estate models that build community wealth and increase asset control
- Strengthen housing ecosystems to preserve communities and generate household wealth
- Accompany leaders developing their relationship-building, adaptive leadership, and cross-sector leadership skills and capacity
- Maintain our core commitment to helping communities build bridges between local priorities and sustained, aligned investment
If some of our priorities sound familiar, it’s because we know that transformation is a long-haul endeavor. The systemic change we seek rarely, if ever, results from singular breakthroughs. Rather, it emerges through relationships and networks, collaborative thinking and coordinated practice, and ongoing ecosystem building. This kind of work requires us to hold complexity without retreating from action. This is hard! But I see so many of you doing it every day, which bolsters my own faith in our ability to hold the tension between clear-eyed realism and collective imagination, persist in our essential work, and achieve our goals of thriving communities supported by vibrant community investment ecosystems.
With love,
Omar
