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Building IACED from Scratch: Julia O’Connor

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IACED designed for comprehensive community development

The following is part of a special feature series to commemorate IACED’s 30th anniversary by highlighting past community development award winners. Julia O’Connor was the 1991 recipient of the Robert O. Zdenek Staff Member of the Year Award. IACED’s 30th Anniversary Celebration will be held November 16, 2016. To register, see iacednext30.org.

A straight-shooter with gobs of energy, it’s no surprise that Julia O’Connor – the second executive director for the Indiana Association for Community Economic Development – was on the forefront of IACED’s successful launch. Before her term as executive director, she was integral to the formation of IACED and its original conference-focused association and was then on the organization’s board. It was O’Connor’s work in creating and bolstering IACED that earned her the Robert O. Zdenek Award in 1991 – work she actually did alongside Bob Zdenek, who went around the country setting up similar associations, in 1986. O’Connor received the award the year before she was hired to lead IACED’s then-staff of three.

Julia O'Connor

Julia O’Connor

Recalling IACED at its infancy, O’Connor said, “When we first started, we were really small. We had $400-500 in the bank account, and Dennis [West of the former Eastside Community Investments] and I said, ‘We are so stinking rich.’”

About the award itself, O’Connor said, “I guess I got it because I did all of the administrative work. I’m a bit anal retentive – crossing the t’s and dotting i’s was always my job. I helped set up the annual conferences. It was really, really pedestrian in look and feel back then – we basically did [the program] with a copy machine. I had no graphics experience. I was cutting and pasting things. It was really fundamental stuff back then. We spent so many hours keeping the wheels rolling. Conferences were how we got our face out there.”

Prior to working at IACED, O’Connor worked at the state – both with the Indiana Main Street Program and the Indiana Department of Commerce. Before that, she was the Executive Director at Riley Area Development Corporation back when it was called Riley Area Revitalization Program. She also worked as staff assistant for the Office of Rep. Lee Hamilton at the start of her career.

Having this varied but deep background in community development and extensive contacts in the industry, O’Connor was poised to tackle the obstacles that come with creating a comprehensive environment for practitioners to connect and with communicating what community economic development is. This was especially difficult in the early days of developing the field, but the team ultimately pulled together the right mix of participants to make it work.

“When people thought of CED, people thought urban,” O’Connor said. “We felt an honest need that everyone from every perspective needed to understand that what they did was the same in a rural community as an urban community. Poverty is poverty … We had a good overlap of urban and rural experience.”

She believes the initial conferences grew because they offered a broad menu of learning options that covered the gamut of issues participants might be facing in their work and gave them opportunities to learn so much from each other.

“Convening people is SO important,” O’Connor said. “I learned more from hearing people say, ‘Here’s what you don’t do’. You can get from books what to do. But from a human perspective, learning from your peers is so important.”

She also talked about how pulling practitioners together helped improve their ability to advocate – together.

“You need your soldiers singing from the same book, or it’s hard to put out the call to contact your legislator,” she said. “You could write the script for them; but they understood the work because they could connect [the issues] to their own experience and apply it locally.”

O’Connor was part of the team that shepherded the 1989 creation of the Low-Income Housing Trust Fund, now called the Indiana Affordable Housing and Community Development Fund. Other highlights from O’Connor’s time at IACED include localizing a six-week project development training course where participants “had to have a project to get in. At the end, they would close the deal, cut the ribbon or break ground.” She was also involved in the creation of the Individual Development Accounts program in Indiana, which was established by state legislation in 1997 and pre-dates the federal IDA program.

More broadly, O’Connor is proud of IACED’s role in building the capacity of nonprofit housing developers. She believes the ripple effect of IACED’s formative work in helping nonprofit affordable housing organizations plan for the future may have improved their ability to weather the housing crisis.

“We encouraged developing reserves. Beyond the length of affordability periods that tax credit deals were required to hold, we told them they need to keep reserves to stay open. And the [foreclosure] rate in Indiana in affordable housing was much less than [across] the Midwest region. If I interpreted [the figures] correctly, I’m thinking – yeah, we did our job.

“We helped create a core of educated nonprofits that helped their communities for the long haul. Maybe they went through troubles, but they understood who to work with and how to make the landing less tragic.”

She added, “I’m most fulfilled by what [my work] did to the future.”


By Jessica Love, Associate Executive Director

Jessica LovJessica Love Headshot - tighter crope is the Associate Executive Director for the Indiana Association for Community Economic Development. She works with the Executive Director to provide team leadership for staff and is responsible for developing and managing organizational systems for IACED to ensure effective management and control. She also provides one-on-one technical assistance to IACED members, informed by her media and grants management background. With nearly 15 years’ experience in the nonprofit sector, Jessica’s consulting work focuses primarily on resource development and creating processes and tools for effective management and program compliance.


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