My Top 5 Methods For Success
How a Decade of Global Study Shaped a New Standard for Community Development
I have spent more than two decades at the intersection of government, business, and community — not as a spectator, but as an architect. I have sat in the rooms where billion-dollar infrastructure decisions are made. I have sat in the rooms where families have no infrastructure at all. What I learned from occupying both spaces is that the gap between them is not a resource problem. It is a systems problem.
Over the past decade, I deliberately built an intellectual framework to close that gap — not from a single discipline, but from five. What emerged is an integrated methodology I apply to every community development engagement I lead. This is not theory. This is practice.
The Integrated Framework
Each system I study answers a different question. Together, they answer the complete question: how do we build communities that last — and belong to the people who live in them?
01 | Organize the Architecture Using STOLO
Before any strategy, any capital, any coalition — there must be a clear understanding of where a community actually stands. I use STOLO, a framework I developed to answer that question. Built around five pillars — Literacy, Values, Self-Esteem, Economic Power, and Justice — STOLO gives communities and organizations a structured way to name, claim, and protect their assets on their own terms.
Most community engagement processes begin with deficits. STOLO begins with assets. It asks: what do you already have, what do you already know, and what do you already deserve — and what surrounding conditions are preventing those things from being fully yours? This diagnostic informs everything that follows. A community that cannot name what it owns cannot protect it. A community that cannot articulate its values cannot evaluate a partnership. STOLO makes the invisible visible, and the implicit explicit.
02 | Use Anti-Poverty Principles to Identify the Gaps
Through my studies in Economics and Global Poverty at MIT, I developed fluency in the analytical tools that identify where economic parity breaks down — and what conditions produce and sustain poverty at both the household and systems level. This is not a philosophical framework. It is a diagnostic one.
After STOLO tells me what a community has, the MIT model tells me what it lacks — and why. Where are the gaps in access to credit, to employment pathways, to safe housing, to civic infrastructure? What are the structural drivers, and which of those are addressable through targeted intervention? This analytical discipline keeps me from designing solutions for the wrong problems. Communities are asset-rich and access-poor. The MIT framework helps me see exactly where the access breaks down — so that solutions can be developed and implemented at the right point in the system.
03 | Build It: Development and Creation
The Owner Management Programme at Lagos Business School reshaped how I think about building. In economies where public infrastructure is often privately managed by necessity — where asset transfer and governance operate through informal cooperative agreements with no direct Western equivalent — entrepreneurship is not a lifestyle choice. It is a survival infrastructure.
This model gave me principles for how to create what a community needs when institutional systems will not or cannot provide it. It asks: who are the builders in this community, what do they need to scale, and how do we build the conditions — financial, relational, structural — that allow locally-owned enterprises to become durable institutions? My time living in Lagos, Nigeria taught me how to be oriented toward community-owned solutions, not externally managed ones. When we identify gaps through the MIT lens, we close them through entrepreneurial development, not dependency.
04 | Built Infrastructure for Transitional Ideation, Development, and Asset Safety
Harvard University’s Advanced Management Development Program (AMDP) in Real Estate Development and Management provided the technical and organizational infrastructure to operationalize what the other three systems identify and design. AMDP is where I learned that in order for ideas to become sustainable assets, they need built places to reside. Then we need the systems to ensure that those assets are structured, governed, and protected throughout the transitional phases of development.
Community development often fails not because the vision is wrong, but because the transition from ideation to implementation is unstructured and left to fight risks without protections. Assets are created but not formalized. Institutions are built but not governed. Resources are deployed but not tracked. Buildings are created, but not tailored. AMDP gives me the management architecture to design those transitions deliberately — from concept to community-owned, managed, and protected infrastructure. This is where the work becomes durable.
05 | The Art of War: Protecting What We Build
Sun Tzu's principles have survived centuries because they speak to something permanent about how power moves, how terrain shapes strategy, and how victories are lost not in battle but in preparation. For community development, this is not metaphor — it is method.
Communities that build without defending what they build lose it. Gentrification does not announce itself. Policy changes do not wait for community readiness. Displacement is rarely sudden — it is gradual, and it exploits the gaps in governance, legal protection, and organized resistance. The Art of War guides how I help communities and the organizations that serve them anticipate threat, build coalitions of defense, protect assets from extraction, and sustain the gains of development across political and environmental cycles. A community without a protection strategy is a community building on borrowed ground.
How They Work Together
These five systems are not sequential. They are simultaneous. In every engagement I lead, I am running all five lenses at once:
STOLO tells me what the community has and where it stands.
Anti-poverty principles tells me where the gaps are and what is driving them.
An entrepreneurial mindset tells me how to develop and create what is needed.
Real estate and development management tells me how to build infrastructure that holds during and after transition.
The Art of War tells me how to protect all of it without ever having to fight.
This is what I mean when I say I combine systems in everything I do. It is not eclecticism. It is civic architecture. The goal is not to apply the most interesting framework — it is to build the most durable outcome. And durability, in community development, is the only measure that matters.
What This Means for Partners
If you are a funder, a developer, a government agency, or a community organization investing in community development — this framework changes what our partnership can accomplish.
The FordMomentum! team does not arrive with a predetermined solution. We arrive with a diagnostic process that respects what the community already knows, identifies what it needs, designs development pathways that are locally owned, builds governance infrastructure to protect the transition, and establishes the strategic conditions that defend the investment across time.
The communities we have worked with — from post-Harvey Houston to the Historic Westside of Las Vegas to housing coalitions serving 5 million metro residents — are not waiting for someone to save them. They are waiting for systems that match their complexity. That is what I bring.
