Congratulations to Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, recipient of our 2021 Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building!
The Award for Lifetime Dedication to Community Building recognizes a person who:
Has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to community building work.
Has exhibited leadership, vision, and a commitment to action and results.
Has catalyzed outstanding impact in community building policy, investment, and/or community change.
Has worked to challenge the status quo in the St. Louis region.
Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Barbara to learn more about her and her work. Here’s some of what Barbara had to say.
Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)
What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?
Mom and Dad courtesy of Barbara Levin
When I was in second grade, I was president of the Busy Bee Club, so I knew I was going to be in charge. I always had to be in charge. I was the president of my youth group too. Then in college, I thought I would be a teacher. At one point, I was an English major. I was of the generation where teaching or nursing was what I was told to do. Social work wasn’t in our framework. My mother came to this country when she was 19. Neither my mother nor my father got beyond eighth grade, but education was really important in my family. So going to college was a big deal. My sister went to art school and worked hard to pay for that. I went to a state school because it was cheap.
The year after I graduated with a BSW, my school implemented a one-year MSW combination. I was part of the first class to come back and get an MSW with advanced standing. I wanted to go to law school at that point, but I was also tired of school: “Three years of law school versus one year to get an MSW? Ah, I’ll do the MSW.” Of course, I went the clinical route because that’s what everybody did. And I never used it because I immediately got hired by a Jewish youth group to do program development, leadership training, and nonprofit advising. In the beginning, I did some therapy as volunteer work. But I always felt like I need to fix things. I can’t sit for an hour nodding my head and keeping my mouth shut going “um-hum.” Still, I use clinical work every day and I tell that to my students all the time.
Courtesy of Barbara Levin
Teaching is hard and it gets harder and harder. While I’m a co-teaching professor, 80% of my job is still field education, which is a lot of coaching and mentoring and developing more field units. One of the most fun things I do when I go to a meeting is sit in the back and count all the Brown School grads in the room talking, sticking with the work they’re doing in St. Louis, making a difference. And I just feel so proud. My husband, Barry, and I only had one child. So it feels like I have a lot of other children. And sometimes I treat them that way. Whenever we’re asked to go for a drink with somebody, they’re either getting married, getting pregnant, or looking for a new job and want to share with us. It’s one of the joys of being in St. Louis. It’s sad when people leave, but the more we can keep them and get them jobs, it’s important for the region. That is my life's work. And if people who come here are going to work in St. Louis, I want them to have a perspective that’s different from just a planning perspective. Social work brings to the table a set of values that are the essence of community development and, for me, it’s all about group work.
When I think about who taught me about community building and the work I’ve been doing for the past 46 years, it’s been a journey. At 13, I joined a Jewish youth group in Baltimore. We were all kids from the city and we weren’t members of anything. Our parents couldn’t afford to join a temple or even the Jewish Community Center. So we all met at each others’ homes and it was very homegrown. That’s how my husband and I met because he grew up in the same youth group movement. He got a scholarship to go to graduate school and I didn’t. But when I finished graduate school, my youth group leader called and asked, “Do you want to move to Boston and work for us?” I was in Boston, Barry was in New York, and we met at a staff meeting.
In those days, every staff person was a social worker. Nonprofits were the same way. Social workers ran everything until we agreed with boards that MBAs did better and we gave organizations up to them. Urban planning grew out of social work too. And what’s nice about community development is it’s not a profession. You don’t get a degree in it. Community development is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It’s a mishmash. You may be a lawyer who understands the legal aspects of zoning and codes, but maybe you don’t know how to talk to people. So it’s important to have social workers at the table. And at the youth group I worked for, every one of our leaders was a social worker. They’d bring in professors from the school of social work who taught us group dynamics at a weekend hotel event. I had to break into groups and facilitate. They set the framework, the values, the way we practiced. And that, to me, was community building.
When I think of social capital, it isn’t about my relationship with people, it’s about the networks and connections people have with each other in a neighborhood. It takes a very long time to build those because it’s about building trust.
If you don’t go to a meeting for six months, I’ve seen that people can forget you. If you move away and come back, it’s hard to get re-established too — which, you can — but, the networks change easily. I don’t want to go to another meeting. I’m as bad as everyone else! I don’t even volunteer in my own neighborhood. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be engaged or bring value. We have to get around the idea that leaders are the ones who show up. They often show up in places designed for the traditional leader — like, someone with time and resources who can attend a monthly meeting. I worried about that with COVID. It was sad that a lot of students didn’t want to enroll in my community development practice class during the pandemic, so we didn’t have the two semesters we usually do in the school year. Students were saying they couldn’t do community development on Zoom, yet the neighborhoods were doing just that. If students can learn how to stay connected and engaged over the computer, in-person’s a no-brainer.
It’s easy to break down social capital connections because they’re tenuous, transient, and, especially at a neighborhood level, people are moving in and out all the time. When do we call elders on the block ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’ anymore? There’s a couple on our block with two kids and they asked, “What are you comfortable with them calling all of you? We don’t want them to call you by your first names.” So I’m either Aunt Barbara or Miss Barbara. It’s that old Southern thing. I still call Miss Shirley, Miss Shirley. And we just lost Miss Dolores from O’Fallon. Connections are falling apart and it has nothing to do with the economics of a neighborhood.
Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis pictured with Constance Siu, Community Engagement Specialist at North Newstead Association (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)
I’ve noticed there’s a shift in that social work students want to do policy. And policy doesn’t necessarily involve relationships. The same people who want to do policy, when we sit down at a cafe with community neighbors, they can’t even speak. You see they’re uncomfortable walking the street and waving at somebody. They’re not even used to doing that in the neighborhoods where they live. I can immediately tell who’s comfortable and who smiles at people versus those who can’t handle being around people. That’s not a Karl or Jillian Guenther; that’s not a Jessica Eiland; that’s not a Timetria Murphy-Watson, Vontriece McDowell, or Constance Siu. It’s kind of like leadership. I understand leaders are not born. However, after eight years of working with teenagers in a youth leadership program, I can look out into a group of kids and pick out who’s going to be the leader. There’s something about their energy, openness, and aura.
The thing I’m most proud of and what got me into the community was being asked to co-teach a community development course the first time with Lou Columbo. He was the urban planner, I was the social worker, and we had to come together on this. We spent six months building relationships in the neighborhood we chose to focus on and we could then model that for students. Now I’ve been teaching that class for many years with Debra Moore and I’ve learned it doesn’t work if a neighborhood is used as a project and a relationship is not built to have something ongoing. It’s a struggle every semester to do that.
My commitment is at the neighborhood level and with the students. So how do we keep it fresh? We’ve consistently been doing semesters in Hyde Park and they then don’t see WashU as being used for research. They knew we would be part of a long-term commitment. That’s very important, just like the message that we give to students. Students are learning things the community already has. Of course, students will learn what Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is. I want students to fundamentally learn how to build relationships. And neighborhoods don’t want a newbie student asking them or testing out their interviewing skills on them. When it’s a one-time thing, the neighborhood is just a paper — the client who a report is written about. But long-term, the deliverables and educational outcomes are different.
Some speak of neighborhoods as a laboratory, and I don’t see them as that. I see them as our partners. The practice of teaching is you listen first to the community, you respond to them, and they have all the answers and assets. Our role is to support that and maybe add to it by giving information about best practices and helping the community decide how to make movements forward and prioritize. Sometimes when we’re teaching students, they’ll wonder what their role is, like, “I know more.” “No, you don’t. You know how to do some stuff. The community knows what it needs.” And if we can also bring some assets around Washington University in St. Louis’ presence and the Brown School’s presence, then that’s valuable too.
I have to continuously check myself because my go-to is to fix things. My daughter will tell you that in a minute. I’ll listen, I’ll ask questions, and then I’ll be like, “Okay, this is what I think you should do…” It’s really hard to just listen. And it’s really hard to listen to something someone’s gonna do that I don’t think is gonna do them well. Even with students, I focus on building that long-term relationship so I can ask them, “Have you thought about trying this or that?” My goal is not just to teach them but to get them on a career path. I love when they can get a job in St. Louis and stay. I wish there were more opportunities though.
Do you find it interesting and challenging or is it creative?
Initially, I was hired at the Brown School to be the program coordinator of an endowed program. The vision was to provide technical assistance for small nonprofits that couldn’t afford consultants and felt that the school had a responsibility to provide that for social service agencies. Alliance for Building Capacity, ABC, was its name and it changed a number of times until it broadened to capacity building through community development and practicum. Whether it’s technical assistance or capacity building, how it’s done for a nonprofit is similar to how it’s done for community development.
So I don’t go into projects and meetings telling you what you need to do. I’m not the consultant who says, “Everyone needs a strategic plan, you gotta do it my way, and this is what you do,” which is sometimes how planners and designers come in. Instead, it’s, “What do you need? What’s your priority? How can I help you build what you want to build?” It’s coming in where people are at, getting the lay of the land from their perspective, and figuring out what I can add to their goals to better their community.
I know my work has to be creative or at least perceived to be unique. And the challenge in the relationship is listening and offering and thinking about what could work. I have no one way of doing things except to listen and to respond. I also know what doesn’t work. I was asked to help with a CDC in a neighborhood group I didn’t spend a lot of time with. I knew people on the board and I approached the invitation to capacity build for the organization. But what they weren’t doing was really listening to the community. So they needed to do their own work. I had to tell them, “We may be ready to do what you want to do, but who is here at the table?” How do you build readiness? Nonprofits aren’t always ready. Communities are often not ready.
Who’s really not heard when it comes to voice and community engagement?
What I’ve been thinking about lately is this whole idea of voice and community engagement. I read an article about how it’s a false narrative because there’s always going to be somebody left out. You may have a majority, like the people who attend to vote on something or do community participatory budgeting, but somebody’s voice is not going to get heard. There’s history around developers who want to come into a community and get some work done and they get a voice. And when they don’t like what they hear or get what they want, they don’t just leave. They’ll keep going around an issue looking to convince people until they decide to pull the funding or find another area they can invest in. Some of this also systematically relates to how communities are funded and how we make decisions. There’s so much need and so much money and so many hands in the pot that investment funds rarely get to the community. The work is a result of historic and ongoing systemic racism at every level and in every aspect — housing, education, economic development, transportation, infrastructure — related to policy and funding access. At the end of the day, we may not be redlining, but we’re doing it anyway. We still have covenants. And we still have to deal with the aftermath because it impacts another couple of hundred years.
What’s a ripple effect you’re particularly proud of that you’ve left in St. Louis?
The reputation of the graduate students who are working in St. Louis. We, more than when I started, recognize the Brown School has something to offer. Our community development work and social work are valuable. And practicum is an innovative way of impacting a community without having to do work in the classroom. I’ll give you an example from the first semester I taught in Hyde Park.
One of our students had a practicum with a community group that was formed and the group wanted to do a Halloween event. So they came up with the idea of calling it Spooktacular and the student convened a group of kids and parents to see what Halloween would look like in the neighborhood. They had never done that before. There were two other groups involved and they were gonna get some money and do a trunk-or-treat that the kids said they wanted at the nearby school.
So we figured out a way to map out a route. One of the locals in Hyde Park has a balloon business, so we bought balloons from her and ballooned the route. Then my students went door to door to ask if residents would be home and if they needed candy we would get them candy. Then we met at the corner of Salisbury and N. 23rd St., planned out for students to take about 10 kids to start the route, another 10 would register, and students would take off to do the route with them too. Then they’d get to the end at Clay Elementary School where there’d be the trunk-or-treat and other organizations would celebrate Spooktacular too.
A half an hour in, like 200 kids and their parents came out of the woodwork. And our students had to teach the kids how to knock on doors. Children would bang on them because they’d never just knocked on someone’s door and said “trick-or-treat!” The parents said, “Oh my god, we never thought we’d do this in Hyde Park.” They used to get in the car and head to the Central West End or Ladue because they didn’t want to do trick-or-treat in their neighborhood for lots of different reasons.
We ended the evening, but it’s continued in that neighborhood in different ways and each time it’s changed depending on what the neighborhood wanted. About the fourth time, the neighborhood decided to have the event at the park in Hyde Park. They got funding and had a stage and dancing and made a horror maze out of wood and it was all very do-it-yourself. They celebrated on a Wednesday night. It was dark. And there were 300 to 400 people there.
A woman whose organization participated was standing with me and Debra Moore and said, “Isn’t this great?” We said, “You did a great job.” And, to us, that was success because the people from the neighborhood knew and felt like they did it. The neighborhood felt like they owned it and they did.
Not only in academia but in the world, if you don’t write about it and document it, it’s as if it didn’t happen. Debra Moore and I talk about how we should have written up the Halloween in Hyde Park story or the work we’ve done in O’Fallon as some sort of paper. Even some of the early work I did with Alliance for Building Capacity, which has since become East Side Aligned. If you don’t write down the stories, they disappear.
What would make a tremendous difference in the work you’d like to do moving forward?
The academic in me would love to be able to point to population-level change. Is the average income in Hyde Park higher with people moving in and out or has it stabilized? Are the residents staying and feeling like they’re part of the neighborhood? How do you measure engagement? Maybe through voting, maybe people want to buy a house if they could, maybe they want to rent to own and it becomes their place? Are people seeing the area as a place they want to be a part of?
I would love to say we can document some of that and I don’t know that we can. That’s way long-term. And I don’t know how to tackle the crime stats. A couple of years ago, there was a little boy shot in Hyde Park right in the street where there’s new housing. There’s a lot of development that has been done. Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church is right there. And with the randomness of shootings and crime, unless we can tackle that, I don’t know how any of this development is really going to move along.
I’m excited to come back for school in person in the Fall and to figure out what’s happening in the neighborhood, what it needs, and how we can support. I haven’t had enough opportunities to really sit with people and hear. And there’s going to be that whole process of meeting with people and opening up again.
Courtesy of Barbara Levin
Why have you decided to put your time and energy into St. Louis and stay?
Honestly, I was a trailing spouse, yelling and screaming in 1993. We came because of my husband’s job. And I said, “Okay, let’s try five years,” and now it’s almost 30 years later. I started working at the Brown School in 2002. It gave me a whole other set of energy. The university can be a great hindrance, but it’s also a gift to work there. Why am I staying now? It’s an easy place to be. We’re city folk. We love cities. And the cities we love the most, we can’t afford to live in. If I could live in Manhattan, I would. Well, after COVID and Zoom, I don’t know. But, life changes.
Courtesy of Barbara Levin
Eventually, I know I’ll want to be closer to my grandbabies. They have changed everything. We just did an interview with the organization that supports work for children with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy, the syndrome one of our granddaughters has. We have a voice to advocate for families without resources. I don’t know how they manage without healthcare coverage, so our heart is there with them. Every child should have access to the kinds of support she has access to. So if we can use our voices in that way, that would be my next thing too. I see the world differently now. I see the world alongside someone with limited physical capacity. It’s a disability in the sense that the structures keep her from being able to be fully in the world.
What’s something about community building today that you didn’t know?
There are textbooks full of stuff I don’t know. But it has reinforced the idea that a top-down approach doesn’t always work. And a bottom-up approach doesn’t always work because if you don’t have the political clout to have that voice, it may not work. How do you find that middle ground? Community building is still evolving and that keeps me excited. The model is still very much about power and money. Where are they and who’s got them?
I read a report from St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) and the first part was a history of all the plans that have been made around St. Louis. I’d be interested to see how much of that money was spent for very little outcomes, except for the ones where plans said to build Highway 64/40 through Mill Creek and North City. That worked. That they were able to do. And that’s the whole history of racism and continued racism in this city. I don’t mind calling it out either.
But how many redevelopment plans actually worked? How do they define community engagement? How did they follow through? And how much money was paid for consultants? I know that last one is cynical and consultants are needed. But so little money gets to people. What would happen if we gave everybody a liveable wage? We could do it. It’s less about money than it is about decisions and leadership. There is money. It’s just not spent how it could be. Webster Groves and East St. Louis have similar city budgets. Who would have known?
Way way back, I was on the decision committee for the annual Community Builders Network awards. I feel like I haven’t been in community development as long or contributed as much as others who might be more deserving. I’m always thinking what I’m doing is not as impactful, so I was really humbled and taken aback by this idea of getting the lifetime achievement award this year.
I remember the day Karl Guenther had a video conference call with folks in Philadelphia about how they have a community development corporation (CDC) umbrella organization. And he walked out of my office, stood in the hallway, and said, “We have to do this in St. Louis!” I told him, “Let’s make it work.” They did it at UMSL because Todd Swanstrom had his Des Lee endowment money to do it. But my history with CBN goes back to the beginning and I believe in what it does and what it has done and how it’s brought us together.
Invest STL came from this idea of developing a local funding resource specifically for community development. So how do we raise money together that will eventually build into a pot we could share with CDCs because funding for them is so minimal? And it started with Karl Guenther and Jessica Eiland and a few other people hanging out at bars one night a week and us putting in $10. Hank Webber and I would attend and we felt like the grandparents of the group. I’d put my money in, have a little drink, and then leave when it got late and I had to go to bed. Since then, it’s morphed into the region’s community economic development support system for growing great neighborhoods in STL.
- Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor with the Office of Field Education at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis
We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Barbara at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!
Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.
