LECTURE: Sustainable Community Development—the Next Generation

If we are going to improve the living conditions in urban New Jersey we need to particular attention to the people living there. One example of this is the YouthBuild Institute at The Isles which just got a major Federal grant for job training and education for youth. Today's Common Lecture will include a visit from The Isles' Marty Johnson:

Environmental Planning Lecture

"Sustainable Community Development—the Next Generation:
A look at Isles, Inc."

Martin P. Johnson
Founder and President
Isles, Inc. of Trenton, New Jersey

Wednesday, October 24
Cook-Douglass Lecture Halls Room 110
4:00 - 5:15


For 45 years, community development corporations (CDCs) have worked to involve at-risk communities in economic development decision making and physical improvement projects. While countless examples of successful community development projects can be found, a closer look at the overall health of these communities in New Jersey raise serious questions about the best approach to addressing concentrated poverty, sprawling development patterns and urban revitalization. In this presentation, Martin Johnson, President and Founder of Trenton-based Isles Inc. will share how his environmental organization has learned to manage innovative local sustainable development and connect it to regional and state organizing and
policy change. Started by Princeton University students and faculty in 1981, Isles has received national and international recognition for its growing self-help urban development, asset-building, environmental, and educational activities. This session will explore how Isles learned about its real impact, adjusted course and now manages for local and regional impact.

Mr. Johnson has extensive experience with community development organizations. He is a founder and chairman of the New Jersey Regional Coalition, designed to organize civic and faith-based institutions in support of more equitable state and regional public policies. He is a member of the Capital Health System (a $300 million nonprofit health care system) Board of Directors, trustee of the Capital City Redevelopment Corporation, and trustee of the National Housing Institute. He is on the Advisory Board to Princeton University’s Architecture Department. He is a former Trustee and Executive Committee member of Princeton
University and former trustee of the Metropolitan Trenton African American Chamber of Commerce. He was also the founding director and former chairman of the New Jersey Community Loan Fund (now New Jersey Community Capital) and a founding trustee of the
Housing and Community Development Network of NJ.
He spent 1996-97 on sabbatical teaching community and urban economic development at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. During that time, he co-founded the Success Measures Project, a national effort managed by the Development Leadership Network to create a better system to measure the impact of community building work.

Isles website: www.isles.org