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About Achieving Excellence

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NeighborWorks Achieving Excellence Program

East River Development Alliance (ERDA) and ERDA President and Founder Bishop Mitchell Taylor received their charter for a credit union, which opened in April 2010 as a part of Taylor's Achieving Excellence performance challenge. ERDA's work received city-wide attention, and in his annual State of the City address, Mayor Michael Bloomberg sang the praises of ERDA and Taylor for their exemplary work: "[the city funding] is a relatively small amount of City resources, but it will have a big impact by allowing credit unions to make more loans to more low-income families. We'll also help open credit unions serving public housing residents, like the one Bishop Taylor is opening in Long Island City this spring. Bishop: You are one banker who truly is doing God's work."

The ERDA credit union will be the first credit union to be chartered in the Obama administration, the first in 10 years in New York state and the first in Queens in 30 years. "As you can imagine it has been crazy." says Taylor, "I think this is wonderful for AE to celebrate. A credit to the program, because we would have never received it if it wasn't for the AE program and the structure it gave our organization."

What You Can Expect to Get Out of the AE Program

This program demands that each participant shape and conduct their learning efforts around specific challenges that will significantly impact their organizations, the field and themselves. Participants set and hold themselves accountable for achieving goals relevant to such challenges. A combination of 12 days of challenging coursework along with coaching support and collaboration among peers will sustain and reinforce your contributions to the performance of your organizations and the ever-changing community development field.

Most importantly, this learning program is built around your real challenges at work. For those selected, this program will help you lead the solutions to your critical challenges, not add more work on top of an already heavy schedule.

You will emerge from this program having advanced your organization’s capacity and performance. Some of the specific outcomes you can expect are:

Definition and analysis of a major performance challenge facing your organization or the communities you serve, including specific ways to assess success on that challenge.
New and revitalized ways of "seeing" and "leading" — cutting-edge thinking on leadership, management, industry structure and strategy, technology, networking and community building will be used to challenge, inspire and help you succeed.
Membership in a network of experienced, motivated, performance-minded fellow community development leaders — people who will help and support you as you find new ways of working and performing.

Profiles and Mini Case Studies of Past Participants

Profile: Stacey Epperson, Frontier Housing [PDF]
(View an infographic that summarizes how far Frontier Housing is going with this initiative following the Achieving Excellence experience.)

For additional information about Achieving Excellence, call (800) 438-5547 or (202) 220-2454, or e-mail training@nw.org.

1325 G St., NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005-3100
Phone: (202) 220-2300 | Fax: (202) 376-2600