JPMorgan Chase Grants $525K to Center for Community Progress Technical Assistance Scholarship Program (Press Release)

Grant will help communities tackle property vacancy and abandonment 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The JPMorgan Chase Foundation has awarded a $525,000 grant to the national Center for Community Progress to support its Technical Assistance Scholarship Program (TASP). The grant will support innovation in the work to revitalize vacant properties, and marks a twofold increase in support for the program.

“The Center for Community Progress’ efforts to replace blight with vibrant, transformative property solutions are reducing barriers to economic mobility,” said Janis Bowdler, Head of Community Development Initiatives for JPMorgan Chase & Co. “We applaud the leadership and innovative community development approach the Center puts forth to make sure neighborhoods thrive using sustainable, thoughtful solutions to address property vacancies.”

Through TASP, governmental entities, in partnership with other stakeholders, compete in an annual application process to receive technical assistance from the Center for Community Progress. Applicants must demonstrate a track record of working collaboratively, a willingness to innovate, the capacity to implement and sustain reform, and significant need, among other qualifications.

From the pool of applicants, up to five communities will be selected to receive on-the-ground assessments of the key barriers to vacant property prevention and revitalization. From those five communities, three will be selected to receive technical assistance scholarships, which includes up to 400 hours of technical assistance delivered by expert consultants over the course of eight months, as well as other benefits.

TASP is described in detail in the Request for Applications, available on the Center for Community Progress website. Applications are due by 3:00pm on November 17, 2016.

Key areas of focus for TASP include the decriminalization of code enforcement, delinquent property tax enforcement and tax lien sale reform, land bank and land banking program evaluation, and open space and land reuse planning.

“We’re grateful for JPMorgan Chase Foundation’s support and partnership for the Technical Assistance Scholarship Program,” said Tamar Shapiro, president and CEO of the Center for Community Progress. “Through this grant, we are working to create the models for vacant property revitalization from which other communities will learn.”

A grant from JPMorgan Chase first enabled TASP to get off the ground in 2014, supporting technical assistance in ten recipient communities over the course of two years. The increased financial commitment of this grant enables deeper, longer engagements intended to have a more profound positive impact on selected communities.

About Center for Community Progress

Founded in 2010, the Center for Community Progress is the only national 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization solely dedicated to building a future in which entrenched, systemic blight no longer exists in American communities. The mission of Community Progress is to ensure that communities have the vision, knowledge, and systems to transform blighted, vacant, and other problem properties into assets supporting neighborhood vitality. As a national leader on solutions for blight and vacancy, Community Progress serves as the leading resource for local, state and federal policies and best practices that address the full cycle of property revitalization, from blight prevention, through the acquisition and maintenance of problem properties, to their productive reuse.