Eighteen months in the making, Northwest Side Community Development Corporation: A Story of Persistence, Adaptation, and Luck is scheduled for release October 15, 2021. The book is available for pre-order through Amazon and Milwaukee independent bookseller, Boswell Books.
Howard Snyder founded the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation in 1983 with a small neighborhood board and a $20,000 loan to buy an abandoned fire station. He spent months scraping pigeon guano off the fire station’s old wood floors before funds were obtained to put in new windows. Board members pitched in to rehab the firefighters’ lockers into functional storage cabinets, and every visitor begged for the chance to slide down the still intact fire pole.
Over the next 37 years, the Northwest Side CDC was buffeted by neighborhood issues, fickle public funding, and ever-present politics. Other neighborhood groups shriveled and died, worn out by the demands that they adapt to changing times. The Northwest Side CDC persevered but only through adaptation and a constant readiness to face facts, accept failure, and regroup for success.
At the end of the Northwest Side CDC’s first 37 years, the organization had lent $11 million to small business, created 1,080 new fulltime jobs, deployed community organizers in a vast swath of the City of Milwaukee, received 21 Office of Community Services Community Economic Development Grants, and received three MANDI Awards. Now located on the 7th floor of Century City Tower, the Northwest Side CDC is a nationally recognized community economic development corporation.
This book is the story of how the Northwest Side and Howard Snyder went from pigeons flying through broken windows to the 7th floor of an historic corporate office building in 37 years.
Howard Snyder, Author 
Howard’s “Story of Persistence, Adaptation, and Luck” not only describes his remarkable career, it also provides an excellent history of Milwaukee and addresses the challenges of community economic development nationally over the last four decades. He notes early on that good organizers “need to answer two fundamental questions: Why? And how?” This book provides such answers to why and how community organizing and business retention are meant to go hand in hand. Howard poses whether the primary role of a nonprofit lender working in an overwhelmingly minority community is that of job replacement or wealth creation. He asserts this as a classic argument since Reconstruction; it remains a relevant quandary for the years ahead. Thanks to Howard for sharing his journey; may we all ponder the lessons.
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