Community Leadership Institute

The Community Leadership Institute was founded in 1994 as a community based organization in North Philadelphia in a low income area now called the American Street Empowerment Zone. We opened our doors in January 2002. In late 2002 CLI staff who were also community residents helped start an organization of residents to defend their rights in the fact of a multi-agency city effort to take their homes and property through eminent domain abuse for private economic investment and land banking. Residents of this primarily non-English-speaking, poor, low-voting neighborhood were caught unaware. They had to vacate their solid non-tax-delinquent homes within 90 days for fair market value. CLI spread the word and developed a leadership core for a resident's movement - Concerned Residents of the American Street Empowerment Zone (CRASEZ). Then in early June 2003 CLI convened the first meeting of the Citywide Coalition to Save Our Homes as a result of contact with impacted residents and allies from around the city when they, we, and the CRASEZ protested and testified at City Council hearings on the taking of over 2,000 properties. We have a strategy to slow down/stop the taking of occupied homes citywdie and build a broader base of support. I come in the year 2002 as a volunteer for a year and then started working at CLI in 2003 as an organizer. My inspiration and vision came with my passion of being displaced with the whole community. CLI is the only organization that is organizing block by block over three years with ten blocks in North Philadelphia. As our former executive director, Rosemary Cubas showed great strength and courage as she fought her battle with cancer and still managed our citywide fight. Rosemary Cubas created a network of many organizations that are impacted directly with eminent domain abuse and displacement. It's a new group called the Community Preservation Network. We still face monsters that the city has created, so we continue to work and fight with our new interim director, Bahiya Cabral Johnson.

Thank you,

Lisa Segarra