Building Beloved Community
“Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
The Nehemiah Initiative Seattle is a faith-based community development initiative (FBDI). Our mission is to disrupt the displacement of the African American community from urban centers and support retention of historically Black faith-based organizations through the development of affordable homes, community spaces and business places on the underutilized property owned by those organizations.
Our Purpose
Gentrification-created displacement is threatening the continued existence of the oldest and largest resource in the Black community. Along with the loss of Black-owned residential and commercial property, Seattle alone has lost over a dozen Black churches in the past 10 years.
The Power of Land
The property assets of the Black churches and institutions in urban centers are unapparelled. These churches and institutions are the largest Black landowners in America’s cities. In Seattle, Black churches own property with appraised values in excess of $100 million. But these faith-based organizations (FBOs) are property rich and cash poor. They lack the cash and many lack development expertise to perform the predevelopment analyses necessary to determine the potential of their property. A critical goal of our initiative is to create programs to prepare leaders of these institutions with the knowledge needed to navigate the development process and to secure needed funding to be a significant participant in the growth of their community.