Photo by Jordan Donaldson | @jordi.d on Unsplash
During this, our 50th anniversary year, we’ll be sharing 50 reasons to celebrate Center for Neighborhoods — one reason each week. The posts will come from different stakeholders in the organization, representing our past, present, and future.
Jack Trawick, who served as executive director of Center for Neighborhoods from 1980 to 2013, is such a foundational figure in the history of the organization that one would be forgiven for thinking he was our first executive director. (In fact, it’s a mistake we made just recently!) That honor goes instead to Ron Gascoyne, who served in the role until 1977.
So who, you might ask, served as executive director in between these two men? The answer might surprise you. She was a woman named Carol LeBourveau. And as Jack tells the story, “Carol came to the rescue during a critical time in CFN’s history.”
At that time, explains Jack, “neighborhood development was considered to be a function of the federal government, through Housing and Urban Development. In 1974, during the Nixon administration, there was a law passed called the Housing and Community Development Act, which established Community Development Block Grants, or CDBGs. Cities would receive a block grant of money according to a population and poverty formula, and then the cities were allowed to distribute that funding within certain guidelines according to their own needs. During those early years, CDBGs were the only way we could be anything other than a voluntary organization.”
In 1977, CFN lost that critical funding. Carol, a board member, stepped in to run the organization as executive director on a volunteer basis until the organization received a federal demonstration grant from the Carter Administration in 1980, which allowed them to hire Jack. Another woman assisted Carol in keeping CFN going: board chair Ann S. Hassett, the first executive director of the Louisville Landmarks Commission.
Jack is clear that without these two women, CFN wouldn’t be here today. “[CFN] had all but gone out of business,” he says. What’s more, they helped usher the organization into a new model, one Jack says was “better defined than the original concept.” It was into this new and improved organization that Jack came in as CFN’s third executive director, an opportunity Carol herself had approached him about.
As we celebrate CFN’s 50th Anniversary this year and Women’s History Month this month, let’s be sure to remember Carol LeBourveau and Ann S. Hassett, the women who saved CFN.