How can you center community voices in messaging?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner at Big Duck. In today’s conversation, we’re going to ask the question: How can you center community voices in messaging? And I’m delighted to be joined by Logan Herring. Logan uses he/ him pronouns and is the CEO of The WRK Group, spelled W-R-K, which includes The Warehouse, REACH Riverside, and Kingswood Community Center in Delaware. Logan began his work in the Riverside neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware, in 2016 as executive director of Kingswood Community, which quickly led him to realize that more support and resources were needed within the community. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Management from Goucher College and a certificate in Non-Profit Leadership from Boston College. Logan, welcome to the show.

Logan Herring: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Farra Trompeter: Well, it’s been interesting to learn about The WRK Group over the past few months, and I understand that you’ve led a $600 million resident-driven revitalization of Wilmington, which is Delaware’s Riverside neighborhood. I just want to start with a brief overview of the three different organizations that make up The WRK Group. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what they do, how they collaborate, and as you’re doing that, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you communicate about these three different groups separately, but also as one entity or one brand, and really that overarching story. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Logan Herring: Yeah, great question. So first, I’ll start with the K in The WRK Group, which is Kingswood Community Center. I started working there, as you said, in 2016. Kingswood has been in existence since 1946. It’s the first integrated community center in the state of Delaware. At Kingswood, we’re, you know, nestled in historically the most impoverished community in the city of Wilmington, all of Delaware, for a fact. And it’s a 17,000 square foot facility that sits on 12 acres of land. So in an urban environment, you know, it’s pretty hard to come by that type of space that you have allotted to you. When I came to Kingswood in 2016, it was a struggling nonprofit, which I don’t like using in that term. We might be able to talk about that a little later. I like using the term “tax-exempt business”, but it was operating as a nonprofit. My predecessor had stolen money from the organization, run it into the ground, and it was my job to come in and turn it around. We’ll just go over, you know, the short story of this.

Farra Trompeter: I’m sure that could be a whole other conversation.

Logan Herring: Yeah. We can talk about it for a long time. But in two years, we were able to stabilize Kingswood Community Center, and we used it as the foundation to give birth to two other tax-exempt businesses: The Warehouse, which is a state-of-the-art teen center that was designed for teens by teens. So it’s a 43,000-square-foot facility that was donated to us by Capital One. It was appraised at $3.6 million when we received the building back in 2018. And we put $5 million in renovations into the building. So open floor concept, literally, every day, run by teens. REACH Riverside is a community quarterback. It is implementing the nationally known purpose-built communities model, which is holistic quality, mixed-income housing, cradle to career education pipeline, community health and wellness, and economic vitality.

Logan Herring: And the way that these three organizations are set up is REACH Riverside is not only the community development organization, but it’s also the managing partner of the three entities. So all of your administrative functions, everything from finance to marketing, to data and evaluation, to IT, safety and security, HR, all those administrative functions are held at REACH Riverside with about 40 full-time individuals. And then they also provide that support and backbone to The Warehouse in Kingswood and really allow them to focus on our customers. But collectively, together, we operate as one, although there are three separate 501c3s, three separate boards, but we move as one. So when you really talk about this term, “collective impact”, I think we’re the epitome of that. We’ve been able to bring about $388 million of resources to this neighborhood in the last six years alone. And back to your question: the way we collectively brand is we’re branded as The WRK Group. The WRK Group itself is not an official entity; it’s just the way we explain how we move those three organizations as one.

Farra Trompeter: That’s really great. I mean, I could get to it later, but I do want to talk about it for a minute, now. Let’s talk about nonprofit versus tax-exempt businesses. Because I was struck by that even the first time we spoke, but you’ve repeated it here today. So let me give you a minute to soapbox about that.

Logan Herring: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to soapbox about that. So, “nonprofit” is not a business strategy, right? It’s just a tax status. And too often when you say the word nonprofit, people think of it, “Oh, that’s cute. It’s a charity. You’re doing, you know, something more with less, right? You’re doing things on a shoestring budget. You are really passionate people doing this work, but you’re not operating it as a business.” So in fact, businesses are created to solve for problems. And in this social sector, you’re typically solving for some of the world’s hardest problems. But yet you don’t want to put the infrastructure, invest in the infrastructure, the people, the resources in order to actually solve for the problem. So what you end up doing is what, you know, some people refer to as “toxic charity”, where you’re there as a permanent crutch, you’re not really solving for the problem. And what I’m really solving for in my organization, people say, “What is your North Star?” Our North Star is to put ourselves out of business. Like that’s why we exist.

Logan Herring: We’re here to end intergenerational poverty. Then I don’t want to be here 20, 25, 50 years from now, celebrating how we’re still in business. That makes no sense to me. So everything we do is, like you said, resident-centered, customer-focused. And if you understand anything about business, the reason why we call it internally “customers” is because customers have choice. And too often we treat our customers like they should be happy to get our services. No. We want to make sure that if we were on the other end of these programs and services, it’s at the quality that we would want it. And how do you do that? By getting the right people on board that meet somewhere in the middle between passion and professionalism. And that’s what we employ here at The WRK Group.

Farra Trompeter: That’s great. And I’ll just make a nod that back on episode 134, I spoke with my friend Joan Grangenois-Thomas on the podcast, asking does the nonprofit sector need to rebrand itself? So people who are intrigued by that conversation and what Logan just shared might want to tune into that.

Logan Herring: Absolutely.

Farra Trompeter: Well, let me go back to my preset set of questions here for you. When we were preparing, I was also intrigued by your work with what you called VIPs: Village Impact Promoters. And again, thinking about branding and thinking about ambassadors, can you talk a little bit about who are VIPs, and how does that program work?

Logan Herring: Well, before I jump into VIPs, just really quickly, disclaimer is I am known around here as an acronymologist. So we have acronyms for everything. VIPs is no different. So VIPs, Village Impact Promoters are eight residents that we hire, and we pay them $1,000 quarterly to help us deliver on this mission. So a lot of times, you know, you want people to be out in the community to be your mouthpiece. You want people to be involved in the work that you do. And typically, what we say in this sector is, right, “We want everybody that we work with to be at the table. We want them to come to meetings, we want them to attend things.” But you’re asking the community with the least amount of disposable income and time, which is the most valuable thing we have on this planet, is our time, it’s something we can never give back to give us that for free. No. That’s disrespectful to the community. So we pay each of them $1,000 a quarter. And when you think about this, when we started out, our average household income in the Riverside neighborhood was $12,000. So you’re adding $4,000 to their overall household income. That’s not insignificant.

Logan Herring: But what it signals to them is that we respect you, we respect your time, we respect your expertise and your experience. Because at the end of the day, you’re the consumer, right? And it’s no different than the Amazons of the world, and Netflix, is it’s catered toward your consumer, your customer. And so our VIPs are a gateway. They’re like our focus group to our customers. They’re our mouthpiece. They’re the ones who are spreading all of the gospel. Everything that we’re doing. They’re our biggest champions. And also they keep us honest. Like, “I don’t know about that.” Or, “That’s not getting great feedback in our community.” And so that’s our VIPs, and we’re very intentional, although it is a great acronym, you know, when you think of a VIP, you know, they should get the red carpet rolled out for them. You should really value what VIPs have to offer, and that’s what we think about our residents and our community.

Farra Trompeter: And just briefly, because I know again, we could have a whole conversation about that, how do you select or how many VIPs are there, and do they get trained on a regular basis? Like, give me just a minute or two on how it actually works.

Logan Herring: Yes. So yes, we definitely work with our VIPs. All of them go through our Empower program. So another acronym: Economic Mobility Places Ownership Within Everyone’s Reach. Our Empower Program is like our flagship program to that North Star of the community being self-sufficient and no longer needing us. So we have navigational coaches that work with all of our families that live in the neighborhood on their goals that they set out to be self-sufficient. And so not only are they VIPs and leaders, they’re also getting the support that they need for their overall well-being and the well-being of their household. And then we see which neighbors step up, that take initiative, that are responsive, their follow through is good, and those are the ones that get recommended for us to be in our VIP program.

Farra Trompeter: Great. And it’s clear that you’re using the community to give feedback on the programs and deliver programs that the community identifies and that they really need. How does that work from a communications perspective? How have you involved the community VIPs, other members of the community, or, like you said, your customers? How do you involve them in developing messaging?

Logan Herring: Yeah, so we’ve highlighted them in videos. As a matter of fact, you know, one of the greatest questions I get asked, and it’s pretty controversial, right, is that G-word: gentrification, right? Because we’re building homes and people are like, “Logan, are you gentrifying?” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” And they look at me, stunned, and I say, “Yeah, we’re gentrifying without displacing.” Right? So if you think about it, you know, gentrification is really the moving of the income level in a neighborhood from a low to a higher income level. But typically, that involves displacing the people that originally lived there. And what we were able to do was build 141 homes to start. We’re building 800 total, but we were able to build the first 141 homes and move 126 families from boarded-up housing that was just run down over to brand new housing.

Logan Herring: And so 126 families out of 141 moved over. And then we videotaped some of those families, and we talked to them, and we got their testimonies. And you know, they’re also in our Empower program. And then we highlight them, you know, on social media posts. And when we do our tours, and as a matter of fact, we just did a tour today–we do a tour every two weeks–but we did a tour today, and we have a 25-year-old young man who is the project engineer on our new 81,000-square-foot Kingswood Community Center, a $52 million construction project. And he hops on the bus, and I asked him these planted questions. I’m like, “Deonte, how’d you get into the construction industry?” And he’s like, “Well, you, Mr. Logan, you did this video about me. The video went viral. The head of one of our largest construction firms in Delaware reached out to you. You connected him with me. He put me on projects. I went to Williamson School of Trades, came out of there, he hired me full-time. And now I’m a project engineer on the very same community center in the very same neighborhood I grew up in and attended at the community center. And I have a 2-year-old that’s now in your early learning academy. And I was the project engineer in the $27 million extension at East Side Charter School, four blocks up.” Like, those are the types of things, like it’s not, and I tell my marketing team all the time, “We don’t have to manufacture content.” All you’ve got to do is take a camera and walk around, and you see it every single day. It’s just authentic.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. And it’s clear to me, as you’re telling that story, how the community is authentically showing up in your messaging and your materials. Have you ever done any focus grouping or feedback where the community is actually giving you feedback to messaging you plan to use, describing the work or the programs?

Logan Herring: Yeah, so one of the greatest examples I think is our teen execs. So we mentioned the VIPs, right? And you get that concept with adults. Well, imagine doing the same thing with teenagers, which we do. So we have eight teens to match those VIPs. So we have eight teens at The Warehouse, and every year we get a new cohort of those eight teens, and we pay them $15 an hour, 15 hours a week, year-round. And they help us run The Warehouse. Not only do they help us run The Warehouse, they also manage our social media on Instagram and the channels that teens actually access. Like the Facebooks and the LinkedIn, the adults do that part. But for the Instagram and all the other social media that I’m not privy to, the TikToks, they actually run those channels. And what we learned at the outset of this in 2018, when I was working with 25 teens from all over the city, basically for the entire summer, is do design sprinting and piloting of programs and to see, you know, what is The Warehouse really going to be about?

Logan Herring: They did a teen night one night, and they had three days to market it. And if it were us, you know, we do all of the typical channels of marketing, we probably put it in the newspaper, put it on Facebook, and put it online, and make calls. And I don’t know what they did, but in three days, they had 400 teens show up, and it was out of hand, not in a bad way, but just because it was at the Wilmington Police Athletic League. So they had to have a certain amount of police presence. You know, if you have 50, you need two officers. If you get the 400, like, we were not prepared for this. So they shut it down, and we had to go restore that relationship with the PAL and write an apology note and all those things. But the moral of the story is that we should not be the ones that are conveying the message to the customers if we are not proximate to it or we don’t understand it. And so that’s been the greatest, I think, pivot we made very early on, is that we can’t always carry the message ourselves. There are more qualified people that can do that, and they might not necessarily have a communications degree, right? But they’re the ones that can get the communication across to the people that really need to have it.

Farra Trompeter: Great. Well, I want to flip a little bit and talk a little bit more about you because, you know, in meeting you and reading your background, I know that you were raised in Wilmington’s West Center City neighborhood, which is just south of where you now work. And I’m curious, how has being from the community shaped your leadership and participation in other programs to support the community, such as boards, professional associations, and other business ventures?

Logan Herring: Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a unique spot to be in. It’s like a double-edged sword, right? Because as a young Black man who, you know, has achieved some success professionally, I’m often looked at as like, you know, the golden child to join all of the boards and be involved in all of the things. And I’m supposed to represent “the Black voice” for our entire community, the state, and sometimes nationally, right? And, you know, I take that as a responsibility that, you know, I just can’t relinquish because I don’t feel like doing it all the time. It reminds me of when Allen Iverson was on the Sixers. It’s like, “I’m not a role model.” And it’s like, well, you have no choice because people are looking up to you.

Logan Herring: But I also understand that it’s not my job to own that entire space myself. It’s my job to kind of open doors for other people, and the experiences that I’ve had throughout my journey, going through private school to public school, to Catholic school, to liberal arts college, I’ve been exposed to all walks of life. And so it’s allowed me to do what they call code-switch, right? But it’s also allowed me to understand, because I come from communities very similar to Riverside, which, you know, Wilmington, Delaware, population of 70,000 people, like, you’re literally five minutes away. So we’re one big community, and you know, just being a part of the fabric of this community, every conversation I have in Delaware, they say you’re like two or one degree of separation apart from somebody. You either dated, mated, or related.

Logan Herring: And then when you’re in these boardrooms and you’re the only Black person, which I am in a lot of boards, and you’re the youngest by far, which I’m on a lot of boards, I just remember what people have always taught me along the way is that you always have something to add of value because you’re the only one with your perspective and your experience. And I’ve realized that my experience is my expertise, as compared to other people’s experience, because they haven’t gone through what I’ve gone through. And so, you know, that’s, I guess, the best way to respond to that question.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, I’m struck by how important authenticity, you know, really is to you. It shows up in how you talk about your work, how your organization operates. And I just want to, before we go, add one more question back to communications. How does that authenticity, how does it show up for you in your day-to-day communications and the words you even use to describe your work?

Logan Herring: Yeah, I think it just derives from the fact that this is very personal for me in a number of different ways, right? I’m raising a family. I have a wife and two kids, a 9-year-old and a 14-year-old, two boys, two Black boys growing up in America, which right now is just, you know, it’s scary times at times, you know, to raise two boys. But I would also say my personal journey, the fact that my grandfather was a huge community leader. I’m in the city of Wilmington. He was the first person to endorse Joe Biden’s political career. You know, Reverend Jesse Jackson used to stay at his house. Just, you know, everything that my life has been, you know, I try to personalize everything, and I didn’t grow up with, you know, the world, but I did have access and privilege to certain things that people that live right next door to me didn’t have. Right?

Logan Herring: And then I think about what I want for my kids, my two boys, and then I think about what I want for every kid that lives in Riverside. And those two things shouldn’t be different, right? If I’m fighting for my kids to make sure they have access to all of the greatest things, then why wouldn’t I do that for other kids who might not have somebody fighting for them? And so when you really make it personal, I say, “You can’t do anything purposeful without making it personal.” And you think about everybody that’s led like a great cause or a great charity, right? It started with, you know, I think Michael J. Fox, right? Or you think of people, celebrities, like there’s a part of it that is personal to them, which is what drives them to do it for other people because they experienced it, and it’s meaningful. And that’s what it’s for me.

Farra Trompeter: And do you think that perspective changes or influences the words or phrases you use when you’re writing or speaking in any way? Or is there an example you can think of about that?

Logan Herring: Yeah, I think for me it’s really about looking at things from an asset base and what’s possible, not what’s probable, you know. I was at a conference last year, and there was a man on stage, Larry Miller, who wrote a book recently, and he is the chairman of Jordan Brand. And he tells in his story that he grew up in Philly, and he killed another teenager at the age of 16, I believe. Went to jail, served his time, came out, wanted to join one of the eight large accounting firms, and got all the way up to getting hired, and then they retracted the offer because of his background. So he vowed never to share his background again. He climbed the professional ranks, did very well professionally, went on to be the chairman of the Jordan brand, and he is now just finally coming clean to the rest of the world about his history.

Logan Herring: The reason why I bring that story up is because, too often, we give up on our young people, right? We give up on people who may have a troubled past or may have done something in the past. And so that, like, that’s what drives me when I communicate, is just like, again, making it personal, understanding that everybody has a story, and I don’t care if anybody looks at me and wants to judge my story. It’s the reason why I’m here. And you know, when you hear other people speak with such authenticity, like how dare I not do the same thing?

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, that’s great. And just, I’m checking, I think the name of that book is Jump: My Secret Journey From The Streets to the Boardroom.

Logan Herring: Absolutely.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. So put that on the book club list, friends,

Logan Herring: How many people out here wearing Jordans because he decided to persist?

Farra Trompeter: Right? Well, if you’re out there and you’re listening and you want to learn more about The WRK Group, go to wrkgroup.org. You can also connect with Logan on LinkedIn. We’re going to link to all of these things on the transcript of this episode at bigduck.com/insights. Logan, before we go, is there any other advice or tips you’d like to share regarding how organizations can center community voices in their messaging?

Logan Herring: Yeah. Find the resources to make sure that you are really showing appreciation for the people that are being affected by your work. So you might not have $1,000 to pay them quarterly, but if you’re going to bring them in, at least feed them, maybe provide some childcare, something. Again, time is something you can’t get back, and we don’t want to be disrespectful to the people that we’re really trying to help. And just think about it through that lens, if you may.

Farra Trompeter: Great. Well, thank you so much, and everyone, have a great, great rest of your day.