Developing Community Trust and Innovation for Neighborhood Revitalization

Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative

Collage of images showing people beautifying Springfield, Ilinois

Highlights

Sai Joshi understands that relationships matter if you want to spark change in communities. That’s why on her first weekend in Springfield, Illinois, she spent most of a day in a church basement chatting with local pastors and community leaders.

Joshi had just arrived in Springfield as a Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow after graduating from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2022. The fellowship was a brand-new program aimed at placing top young talent in high-impact roles with local governments across the United States, assisting cities to deepen their capabilities, and bringing those fellows together every few months to learn from each other and Harvard faculty. Her job for the next two years: help revitalize Springfield’s East Side, where poverty, crime and vacant housing are big challenges, and build the city’s capacity to innovate when serving residents.


$5.5 million

Secured for Springfield East Side projects

Joshi was there in the church basement to listen and learn from people who know the East Side, a predominantly Black neighborhood, better than anyone. They told her about the 1908 race riots, when a white mob burned down Black-owned homes and businesses there. She heard about how redlining in the 1940s entrenched racial segregation and how generations of disinvestment undermined recovery.

Joshi could feel the history of distrust between the community and City Hall. But as the mayor’s person charged with turning that dynamic around, she sensed a window of opportunity, as well.

“It was just me and the mayor sitting with the pastors all day, eating lunch, talking and trying to understand the history and what’s needed,” Joshi says. “Going to the church in the first week of the fellowship was really important to getting community buy-in from the get-go and setting the tone around my work’s approach. While the community saw it as an incredible opportunity to have this capacity at City Hall dedicated to thinking about the East Side, I saw it as an opportunity to let their lived experiences and needs drive the work.”

Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow Sai Joshi

  • Graduated: 2022 from Harvard Graduate School of Design, Master’s of Architecture in Urban Design

  • Fellowship location: Springfield, Illinois

  • Work focus: Targeted strategies to revitalize Springfield’s East Side

  • Next job: Senior Policy Advisor, New York City Office of the Mayor

Working in collaboration with East Side residents and city staff, Joshi developed a portfolio of 11 innovation projects aimed at improving quality of life in the community. The most visible is called BUILD Springfield. Every other month, a section of the East Side gets a makeover as dozens of city staff and partner organizations flood into the area to clean up and mow vacant lots, trim trees, fix broken signs and traffic lights, and make other infrastructure improvements. At the same time, city staff go door to door to hear directly from residents about neighborhood problems, taking care of some issues right away.

“The first time we did it, a lot of residents came up and asked us, ‘What are you guys doing? We’ve never seen the city come to the East Side,’” Joshi recalls. “To me, the success is creating an opportunity for city staff to go out into the community to see the people they’re working for.”

City of Springfield Illinois description of BUILD program

The city created flyers to explain the BUILD Springfield program.

By the summer of 2024, BUILD Springfield had cleaned up 119 blocks, or about 15 percent of the East Side. Gunshots in the area are down and service requests are up — a sign that East Side residents see the city as more responsive to their needs. The city is also addressing localized challenges proactively with Public Works “Zone Managers” and Neighborhood Police Officers. The state of Illinois awarded Springfield a $3 million grant to continue the program.

That wasn’t the last grant Joshi would help Springfield land. In 2023, she wrote a white paper on how to scale up promising East Side programs aimed at minority workforce training and development. That paper turned into a grant application that earned a $500,000 award from the federal government. The planning grant funded new staff to hone Springfield’s workforce development strategy after Joshi’s time in the city ended, helping realize the fellowship’s capacity-building aim.

Fellow Sai Joshi speaking at a public event in Springfield, Illinois with the mayor and others in attendance

Springfield Mayor Misty Buscher (left) and Sai Joshi (speaking) engaged residents in neighborhood revitalization.

Before attending Harvard, Joshi worked in India, advocating for indigenous and tribal communities in Mumbai and elsewhere. She sees parallels between historic underinvestment there and what she’s experienced in Springfield’s East Side — and believes city government is the place to be for young professionals like her who want to make change that people feel in their lives.

Joshi’s next job after the fellowship is with the NYC Office of the Mayor Innovation Team, where she will work on a number of issues, including increasing the uptake of social benefits programs among eligible residents. “The grassroots work I was able to do through the fellowship was incredibly rewarding,” she says. “And I am grateful to be able to continue the work in New York City Hall. I want to serve historically underinvested communities.”

Related Resources

Watch "A Day in the Life" with Sai on Instagram

Action Insights: Breaking Down City Hall’s Silos: Collaborative Innovation in Practice

Key Insight

Getting buy-in from the right people is so incredibly important, both inside City Hall and in the community.  It’s critical to get to go out in the community, build relationships, get to know the people you are working for, and let their participation and support drive the work’s mission. Sai Joshi
Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow, Springfield, Illinois, 2022-2024

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