Using the tools of corporate and transactional law to support grassroots movements
The Community Development & Movement Infrastructure Clinic (CD-MIC) uses the tools of corporate and transactional law to support grassroots efforts to make New York—and the country, and the planet—more equitable, sustainable, and just.
Our legal work touches on many areas of law: contracts, corporations, employment law, property and real estate, and tax (especially exempt-organization tax law) are routine, but anything from criminal law to land use to securities might arise in any given semester.
Community Development
Community development refers to grassroots, community-led efforts that aim to improve the quality of life and build community power, especially in low-income communities of color. Community development often overlaps with economic development, which aims to improve the quality of life in low-income communities through economic means, like small business development and job training. These often overlap and are commonly called Community Economic Development—or simply “CED.”
Since at least the 1980s, CED has tended to be a symbiotic form of social change: low-income communities are given opportunities for material benefits in exchange for equal or greater benefits going to investors, developers, lenders, and private companies. We see this symbiotic relationship in government programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (26 U.S.C. § 42) and the Opportunity Zone program (26 U.S.C. § 1400Z), in private funding models like Community Benefits Agreements, and in philanthropy that shields inherited family wealth from taxes in exchange for funding (and, to a degree, controlling) starved community programs.
But CED groups and their lawyers are not without agency in these relationships. Every day, CED lawyers negotiate with government and private entities to push them to leverage their funds for community projects in ways that break as little as possible from the visions of their community clients.
Movement Infrastructure
Despite the importance of these local struggles for community-directed improvement, there are limitations to the CED model: CED groups can be reluctant to aggressively challenge the structural drivers of inequality because they often need banks, corporations, and government agencies to provide financial support for their visions for change; CED groups tend to limit the scale of their ambitions to improving their neighborhoods, rather than aspiring to build ambitious, contentious movements that cross community lines; and larger CED projects almost always require the kinds of legal and financial complexity that necessitate substantial involvement from lawyers, lenders, sophisticated non-profit leaders, and others who sometimes push the people with the most at stake in the struggles of their own communities to the margins of the most consequential decisions.
CED legal scholars have a long history of trying to distinguish between forms of CED that have greater and lesser impacts, a history that shows many CED lawyers experimenting with efforts to use the same toolbox of corporate and transactional law to support efforts that are more deeply connected to social movements and to grassroots projects that have a vision for change that stretches across neighborhood borders.
The CD-MIC is a Unique Project at Brooklyn Law School
Transactional law clinics at many law schools teach students core transactional skills, including interviewing, counseling, case planning, drafting, negotiation, and legal ethics in a group representation context. Brooklyn Law School’s CD-MIC shares that focus on transactional skills development, but it also brings a unique focus on developing collaborative relationships with social movement groups to help build movement infrastructure in New York and beyond.
Some of our clients are conventional CED groups, like community-based non-profits, affordable housing developers, worker-owned cooperatives, and social enterprises, but we also aim to use our legal toolbox to provide support to groups operating at the intersection of community development and social movements. Our clients include movement spaces and mutual aid groups, activist networks, social enterprises, community gardens, non-hierarchical collectives, tool libraries, established nonprofits and cooperatives seeking to better align their internal structures and procedures with their values, community land trusts, tenant unions, and other groups building toward a more equitable future today.