When Washington Stalls, Communities Can Still Build
Why Seven Years of Change Can Bring Real Hope
The public plans discussed here provide historical evidence. No endorsement of Seven Years of Change by any president, elected official, public agency, or outside organization is claimed or implied.
Hope is often presented to working people as something they should preserve while they wait: for the next election, for Congress to act, for funding to arrive, or for an agency to make a decision. By the time help travels from Washington through state and local systems, families may already have endured years of rising rents, expensive food, unreliable transportation, limited care, and employment that does not cover the cost of living. Buildings remain empty, young people struggle to find a place to begin, and experienced adults watch valuable skills go unused.
Seven Years of Change begins from a different idea:
Hope becomes credible when people can work together and produce a real result now.
This does not mean government is unnecessary. Public policy, civil-rights enforcement, public education, infrastructure, labor protections, environmental standards, housing, health care, and national economic policy all matter. Communities cannot reproduce every power or resource of government, and they should not be expected to do so. But they should not have to remain motionless whenever government is slow, divided, or moving in the wrong direction.
The ideas have crossed party lines
For more than thirty years, Republican and Democratic leaders have repeatedly returned to a common set of conclusions. Economic hardship is often concentrated in particular communities. National growth does not reach every neighborhood equally. Local organizations possess knowledge and relationships that distant institutions may lack. Employment, education, housing, transportation, capital, and supportive services must work together if people are expected to move from crisis toward stability.
One important example began in 2000. President Bill Clinton and Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert supported a bipartisan package intended to attract private investment into underserved urban and rural communities. The resulting federal law created forty Renewal Communities and expanded related community-development incentives. In 2002, the George W. Bush administration selected the participating areas, including Memphis and Chattanooga. The communities became eligible for tax incentives intended to encourage job growth, business development, commercial revitalization, affordable housing, and cooperation among public, private, and nonprofit partners. (Clinton White House Archives)
President Bush also established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in January 2001. Its founding executive order stated that faith-based and other community organizations were indispensable in addressing poverty and neighborhood distress. It did not argue that those organizations should replace government. It said government should recognize them as partners, remove unnecessary barriers to their participation, strengthen their capacity, and judge programs by whether they produced legitimate public results. (George W. Bush Archives)
These policies had important limits. Tax incentives did not guarantee that investment would reach the people facing the greatest barriers. Federal partnerships could strengthen local service organizations without transferring ownership of land, businesses, housing, or productive assets to residents. Still, the policies recognized something that remains important: Washington may possess money and legal authority, while people closest to a problem often possess the relationships, experience, and local knowledge necessary to respond.
A national plan and the people still left outside it
In 2008, the Obama-Biden campaign’s Blueprint for Change: Obama and Biden’s Plan for America presented a broad national program covering employment, education, energy, small-business development, rural communities, women, poverty, public service, housing, transportation, fiscal policy, and economic security. It proposed infrastructure investment, support for working families, stronger education and workforce pathways, clean-energy employment, expanded service opportunities, and greater protection from economic exploitation. (Obama-Biden Campaign, Blueprint for Change: Obama and Biden’s Plan for America, 2008)
The country then entered the difficult recovery from the Great Recession. That recovery did not reach every group equally. In 2010, the national unemployment rate for Black workers averaged 16 percent, compared with 8.7 percent for White workers. The figures did not mean that every person within either group had the same experience, but they showed that broad economic recovery could coexist with severe and concentrated hardship. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
In 2011, the National Urban League responded with a more targeted question. It did not ask only whether the economy was improving. It asked who remained unemployed, which neighborhoods were still outside the recovery, whether young people had a path from education to paid work, whether small businesses could obtain capital, and whether communities of color would share fully in the growth of industries.
The League’s twelve-point jobs plan called for measures including summer employment for young people, urban jobs academies, stronger workforce systems, expanded small-business lending, direct job creation, an Urban Jobs Act, urban homesteading, and Green Empowerment Zones designed to connect clean industries and employment with communities experiencing severe unemployment. The National Urban League’s later workforce-policy paper, Educate, Employ, Empower, confirms that it launched the Twelve-Point Jobs Plan in 2011, while contemporaneous reporting preserves the complete list of proposals. (National Urban League, Educate, Employ, Empower; Zondra Hughes, “The 12-Point Plan for Urban Economic Recovery,” Rolling Out, April 18, 2011)
The Urban Jobs Act addressed an especially important reality: people rarely face one barrier at a time. A young adult may need education, job preparation, transportation, childcare, housing assistance, mentoring, food support, and a connection to an actual employer. The proposal would have funded nonprofit organizations to provide coordinated education, employment, case-management, and support services rather than forcing each person to navigate every barrier through a different office. (Kirsten Gillibrand)
The complete Urban Jobs Act did not become law in 2011. However, key provisions were later incorporated into the bipartisan Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014, including greater participation by community-based organizations and more comprehensive education and employment services for young people. That progress mattered, but it also demonstrated the time problem: several years passed between the urgent diagnosis and enactment of part of the proposed response. (Kirsten Gillibrand)
Political timing can narrow even a strong proposal
Timing was not the only reason these ideas moved slowly, but it was part of the setting in which they entered Congress. President Obama began his administration with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Following the 2010 midterm election, Republicans held 242 House seats and Democrats held 193, while Democrats retained the Senate and presidency. The official House history describes the resulting 112th Congress as a period in which divided government complicated legislative work and major agreements repeatedly failed. (History, Art & Archives)
It would be too simple to say that one election alone defeated every useful proposal. Legislation also depends on committees, budgets, leadership priorities, Senate rules, negotiations, administrative capacity, and public pressure. The narrower conclusion is more defensible: the Urban League’s targeted proposals arrived as Washington was moving from unified Democratic control to divided government, making an already difficult legislative path less predictable.
This is not a story in which one party always cared, and the other never did. Both parties have held power during decades in which working-poor and poor communities continued to face unstable employment, unaffordable housing, environmental harm, unequal access to education and capital, and repeated economic shocks.
The deeper problem is how change travels.
Even a serious national proposal must survive elections, congressional committees, competing priorities, budget negotiations, administrative rulemaking, legal challenges, and another election. A plan may take years to become law and more years to reach the people it was written to help. A change in political control may delay it, reduce it, redirect it, or end it. A program built around private investment may bring money into a neighborhood without giving residents ownership or governing authority. A program built around public grants may provide valuable services but disappear when funding ends.
Meanwhile, people still need food, housing, transportation, care, safety, and work.
Opportunity Zones continued the bipartisan pattern
The same place-based approach returned through the Investing in Opportunity Act. Democratic Senator Cory Booker, Republican Senator Tim Scott, Republican Representative Pat Tiberi, and Democratic Representative Ron Kind introduced the bipartisan proposal to direct private capital toward economically distressed communities. It sought to create geographically targeted funds that could invest in businesses, entrepreneurship, infrastructure, and neglected property. (Cory Booker)
Key elements of that proposal became part of the federal Opportunity Zone program established by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. This program provides tax incentives to eligible investors who invest capital in designated low-income communities through Qualified Opportunity Funds. According to the Internal Revenue Service, its purpose is to promote economic growth and job creation in underserved areas. (IRS)
In 2025, federal law made the Opportunity Zone incentive permanent, established new designation rounds beginning in 2027 and recurring every ten years, and added enhanced provisions for qualifying rural investments. The permanent renewal shows that current Republican policymakers continue to use targeted tax incentives to attract private investment to underserved urban and rural communities. (IRS)
Opportunity Zones may bring capital into places that have experienced long-term disinvestment. But capital entering a neighborhood is not the same as residents owning what gets built there. A development may increase property values without making housing more affordable. A business may create jobs without sharing authority or profits with workers. An investor may receive a strong return while the surrounding community remains exposed to displacement, rising costs, or dependence on outside ownership.
The unanswered question is not only whether investment occurred. It is who controls the result.
California showed what a state can do
In 2021, California authorized a Green Empowerment Zone for the Northern Waterfront area of Contra Costa County. The law permits participation by Contra Costa County and designated cities, including Benicia and Vallejo in neighboring Solano County. Its stated purpose is to build upon the region’s concentration of skilled energy workers by prioritizing access to tax incentives, grants, loan programs, workforce training, and private investment in renewable energy. (LegiInfo)
The governing board brings together state and federal representatives, local elected officials, large employers, regulatory agencies, small-business and economic-development organizations, labor, workforce and education leaders, and environmental and environmental-justice representatives. Its work includes identifying projects, coordinating public and private resources, seeking federal support, partnering with colleges and universities, reviewing policy barriers, and making recommendations intended to improve the region’s economic well-being and quality of life. (Contra Costa County)
California did not solve every problem by creating a regional authority. A seat at a regional table does not automatically produce affordable housing. Training does not guarantee dependable employment. Investment does not guarantee that residents will own the businesses, land, equipment, housing, transportation systems, or energy assets created through it.
But California demonstrated something important: a state and its local partners do not always have to wait for the federal government to reproduce every part of a worthwhile national proposal.
That leads to the next question.
Must communities wait for states?
The missing community operating layer
Seven Years of Change says communities can begin now.
It does not claim to have invented green employment, workforce development, cooperative enterprise, affordable housing, neighborhood food systems, public service, small-business finance, or place-based investment. The ideas already exist. So do many of the people, skills, relationships, kitchens, vehicles, gardens, tools, buildings, institutions, purchasing patterns, and repeated unmet needs required to begin.
What is often missing is a practical way to connect those pieces, begin at a manageable scale, measure what happens, correct mistakes, and turn successful work into community-owned capacity.
The process may begin with one honest conversation. That conversation can lead to a shared meal and a careful neighborhood survey—not one designed by outsiders to confirm what they already believe, but one that identifies what residents need, what useful resources already exist, who holds authority over those resources, and which people continue to return. From there, seven people can test one small, lawful action, publish the evidence, correct what fails, and decide whether the work should continue.
A neighborhood does not need to begin with a headquarters or a large grant. It might begin with an underused kitchen and families seeking affordable meals. It might begin with drivers already traveling routes that elders and disabled residents need to use. It might begin with an empty building, a vacant lot, a damaged garden, an unemployed graduate, an experienced caregiver, a retired tradesperson, a teacher, a mechanic, a farmer, or a young person ready for meaningful responsibility.
The first task is not to construct another distant organization. It is to see what is already present and ask disciplined questions. What need continues to return? Who already knows how to respond? Who holds authority over the property, equipment, or other resources required? What can be done safely, lawfully, and with consent? How could a first act of care become dependable work? How could workers and residents eventually own what they build?
Help must come before participation
A person who is hungry, frightened, exhausted, unhoused, ill, grieving, or caring for someone in crisis should not first be asked to attend meetings, contribute money, join an organization, or assume responsibility for a community project.
Help comes first.
That help may include food, shelter, safe parking, rest, transportation, a respectful conversation, or connection to immediate assistance. Stability does not make a person worthy; that worth was never in question. Stability creates enough room for people to breathe, make choices, recognize their abilities, and decide whether they want to participate.
When people are ready, they can return not as permanent clients but as builders, workers, decision-makers, owners, teachers, protectors, and authors of the evidence.
Seven Years of Change calls them Butterflies because their capacity was already present. Crisis may have hidden it, restricted it, or made it impossible to use, but the platform did not create their intelligence, dignity, or leadership. Its responsibility is to help remove the conditions that kept those qualities trapped.
The Hummingbirds are already moving among neighbors and needs. They carry information, food, tools, rides, introductions, encouragement, and practical care. Their purpose is not to recruit followers for 7YOC. They strengthen the relationships through which communities become better able to care for themselves and one another.
Neither the Butterflies nor the Hummingbirds belong to the platform. Seven Years of Change is temporary connective tissue. Its purpose is to help people find one another, build what is needed, and continue without it.
Women lead because authority must change
Many public proposals describe women as workers, parents, caregivers, patients, business owners, or people entitled to safety and fair treatment. Those protections are necessary, but Seven Years of Change makes an additional structural commitment.
Women do not merely receive services from the platform. Women govern it.
They oversee finance, operations, appointments, accountability, safety, succession, protection against capture, transfer of authority, and the platform’s eventual closure. This is not ceremonial leadership. It requires access to records, control over consequential decisions, the power to correct failures, and the authority to stop unsafe or exploitative activity.
The purpose is not to place another burden on women or ask them to repair every social failure without resources and support. It is to recognize and formally entrust women with authority they have exercised throughout history in law, science, enterprise, government, education, agriculture, medicine, finance, invention, organizing, protection, family, and community life.
Investment is not the same as ownership
The long history of Empowerment Zones, Renewal Communities, community partnerships, workforce initiatives, tax incentives, and regional authorities leads to a question public policy often leaves unresolved:
What remains under community control when the grant, investor, administration, designation, or coordinating organization is gone?
A public program may provide an important service. A grant may create a needed job. A training course may produce a valuable credential. An outside investment may repair a building or open a business. Each can improve lives.
But none automatically transfers power.
Did residents acquire productive assets? Did workers gain meaningful authority? Did the neighborhood retain land, equipment, vehicles, kitchens, housing, energy systems, knowledge, relationships, or purchasing power? Did necessities become more affordable? Did money continue circulating nearby? Did environmental harm decline? Could the community keep operating after the original sponsor left?
Seven Years of Change measures success by what people can still own, govern, and continue after the platform is gone.
That is why it is designed to be temporary. Seven years provides time to help people stabilize, build relationships, test ideas, establish enterprises, make honest mistakes, correct them, transfer knowledge, and secure local ownership. It also establishes a limit. The platform must not become another permanent institution that accumulates authority, protects its own existence, and makes the people it serves dependent upon it.
Its greatest success will be becoming unnecessary.
Why hope is reasonable
The historical record does not show that Americans lack ideas. Leaders from both parties have recognized that concentrated hardship calls for targeted investment, useful employment, stronger local organizations, access to capital, and pathways toward greater economic independence. National civil-rights organizations have identified which communities were still being missed. California has shown that states and regional partners can move parts of these ideas forward even when federal action is incomplete.
What remains unfinished is the movement from investment in a community to ownership and governing power within that community.
Seven Years of Change begins there.
It does not ask people to stop voting, stop demanding responsible government, or stop supporting sound public policy. It asks what ordinary people can lawfully build while those greater efforts continue. Government can act while communities build. Public investment can support resident-owned enterprises. National standards can protect people while local knowledge guides implementation. Immediate assistance can meet a crisis while long-term ownership reduces the likelihood that the same crisis will continue returning.
Seven Years of Change helps ordinary people build fair, green, community-owned solutions—led by women and designed to leave lasting local power behind.
The first action does not have to solve every problem. It must be honest, useful, safe, measurable, and strong enough to demonstrate that people are not powerless.
Hope is not what communities are told to preserve while they wait. Hope becomes real when people help one another build something they can own, govern, protect, and carry forward.
For People and Planet. Until Green Is How We Live.
Geoff Barrett - Founder of sevenyearsofchange.org