To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.

We want to bring enterprise back to blighted urban areas. People there have been told nothing is ever going to change. The policy makers may feel the same way.

It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.

You know, I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote "smart" kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

Race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities.

I want to be known as someone who got caught trying. Yup. Trying to make communities that didn't think much of themselves see themselves as fabulous, powerful, beautiful, loving, kind, members of this world. That's what I want people to say about me.

Build. Transform. Love. These are words I use all the time as we speak about community building and even real estate development because these are the kind of communities, like, we want to show you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. And when people think about living in a neighborhood, they are not thinking about fight - the community of their dreams, they are not fighting in it, they are not struggling in it. It's not, "Oh, I gotta put on my armor." All the time. I don't want to live like that. I don't.