By Dr. Erica Henderson, CEcD | Principal & CEO
In St. Louis, residents have been telling us what they need for as long as anyone has been asking.
They told us before Mill Creek Valley was demolished in 1959, displacing 20,000 Black residents and erasing a neighborhood that had been the center of Black professional and cultural life. They told us when Homer G. Phillips Hospital was closed in 1979 despite years of community resistance. They told us while drawing redlining maps, and then while continuing to use them after they were officially retired. The historical record sits in books such as Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, and Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline. It sits in the exhibits at the Missouri History Museum and the markers along Market Street. It sits in the lived experience of residents who can name what was taken from their families.
Communities have told us, repeatedly. The record is not ambiguous.
In May 2025, an EF3 tornado carved 22 miles of destruction through neighborhoods that have been on the wrong end of every wave of disinvestment for a century. In the months since, those same residents have been asked to participate in recovery planning, infrastructure consultation, federal aid intake processes, and an ongoing wave of neighborhood-level engagement. At the same time, the city is conducting comprehensive planning. ARPA dollars are being deployed. Ram’s settlement money is being distributed. Strategic plans, community needs assessments, and mental health service plans are running in parallel.
The same residents are answering the same questions again. Most of them already know what’s in the reports. They wrote the substance of those reports decades ago.
I own a social impact consulting firm in St. Louis called Key Strategic Group. We do engagement work. We build trust in the community. We’ve spent years sitting in living rooms, church basements, and community centers across this region, asking residents to share what they need and what they want. We do this work because we believe in it. And I want to be honest about something that has been sitting with me as the work has accumulated.
The pattern most of us in this field have followed, myself included, has been to collect findings, write reports, deliver them to clients, and move on. The next firm or initiative comes in and starts over. The reports are often excellent. The findings often match the previous set of findings. The conditions in the neighborhoods where the engagement happens remain remarkably consistent.
This is not because the community didn’t share enough. It’s because the systems that determine what gets built, funded, and prioritized have not been organized to use what communities have shared. Engagement, as currently practiced in most of the field, is disconnected from systems-level decision-making. It produces programs. It rarely produces policy, infrastructure, or the kind of structural change that actually shifts conditions.
At KSG, we’ve been working on this internally for some time. When we take on a new engagement, we read the prior reports first. We cross-walk findings from previous projects in the same neighborhoods. We identify themes that have been consistent across multiple engagements and the unaddressed gaps. It changes how we show up. We can tell a community what we’ve already learned about what they’ve said and ask them what’s changed, what they want to push back on, and what the next layer of the conversation looks like. The engagement gets sharper. The community time gets respected.
This is good practice. It is also not enough. What KSG does internally, the field needs at scale, available across organizations and across the region.
The question I’ve been sitting with is when, exactly, do we plan to do the thing the community has been asking us to do?
If you read the body of community engagement findings produced in St. Louis over the last twenty years, the priorities are consistent. Affordable housing. Quality schools. Safe streets that aren’t policed punitively. Economic opportunity that doesn’t require leaving the neighborhood. Health care that’s accessible and dignified. Spaces for young people. Repair of the historical theft that hollowed out Black wealth and Black neighborhoods. The findings don’t change much. The conditions don’t change much. The cycle continues.
This is the cycle of poverty perpetuated by the absence of policy and infrastructure to act on what the community has already named. We don’t need more programs. We need the policy, the systems, and the infrastructure that turn cumulative community voice into structural action.
There’s a parallel worth holding. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard publishes an annual State of the Nation’s Housing report. Decision-makers across housing finance, policy, and development cite it constantly. It is the reference document the field uses. There’s nothing magic about it. It’s a synthesis, published reliably, that decision-makers trust and refer to.
What if a region had something equivalent to community priorities? An annual reference that documents what residents across neighborhoods have said, what’s persistent, what’s shifted, and what remains unaddressed. A civic asset that decision-makers reference and communities can hold them to.
The infrastructure to build it isn’t structurally complicated. Synthesize engagement findings across projects to surface the patterns. Build a community-facing playbook and online tool that reports findings back in plain language. Pilot the model with consent on engagement work that’s already happening. Then expand: layer in publicly available reports, then invite other practitioners to contribute their findings with attribution, governance, and consent.
I want to be clear about who this work is for and how it relates to the field. There are many excellent engagement consultants in St. Louis and across the country doing important work. This isn’t about replacing or critiquing that work. The opposite. The infrastructure I’m describing should elevate what every engagement firm produces by ensuring that community priorities accumulate over time rather than being extracted in isolation. It should make all of our work more effective. It should be built in partnership with the funders who commission engagement work and the community-based organizations that hold the trust. It should be owned by the field, not by any single firm, including mine.
The reason this doesn’t yet exist is some combination of factors. Engagement findings are usually proprietary to the client who paid for them. No neutral convener has had both the credibility and the incentive to do this work at scale. The community trust required is not built overnight. And the field has been organized around projects rather than infrastructure. Each of those barriers can be addressed. None of them is the actual reason this hasn’t been built.
The actual reason is harder to name. It’s that doing this work would require the field to acknowledge that the current model has not delivered the structural change communities have been asking for. It would require funders to invest in infrastructure rather than only in programs. It would require practitioners, including firms like mine, to share findings rather than keep them to themselves. It would require the people who benefit from the status quo, in subtle and uncomfortable ways, to give something up.
That includes me. So let me name what I think a serious response looks like, in three places.
If you’re a funder reading this: before funding the next engagement project, ask what community in that neighborhood has already said and what happened with it. If the answer is “I don’t know,” that’s the gap. The next round of grant dollars is more useful invested in infrastructure that surfaces existing findings than in another extraction. The question worth pressing your grantees on is not “did you engage the community,” but “did anything change as a result of what the community said?”
If you’re a community engagement practitioner: stop treating client confidentiality as a sufficient excuse for not sharing community insight across projects. Negotiate consent up front. Build sharing into your contracts. The data communities give us is not ours. If you’re already doing internal cross-walks like we are at KSG, let’s compare notes. The field gets stronger when we share what we’re learning about the practice.
If you’re a community-based organization leader, push back when the next consultant or planner shows up asking the same questions your community has answered three times in the last five years. Ask what they’ve read first. Ask what they’re going to do differently with what you tell them. Make accountability the price of access.
This is the work I’m sitting with right now. It’s also the work I think the next generation of community strategy has to take seriously. We have decades of community voice already documented. We have the technical capacity to synthesize and share it. What we don’t have, yet, is the will to acknowledge that the systems we work within have been organized to absorb community input without acting on it, and that acknowledgment is the precondition for changing the pattern.
The honest answer to my aforementioned question is that in most of the field right now is this: after the next round of funding.
It is the same answer it has been for 40 years.
We can do better. I think St. Louis can be the place that demonstrates what better looks like. Not because we’ve solved the problem, but because the cumulative weight of what’s been said here, the depth of the historical record, the dollars currently moving through the region, and the urgency of the current moment make this the right place to build the infrastructure the field needs.
