The Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley held its Virtual 2019-20 Annual Meeting today with a crowd of more than 250 attendees. The meeting featured a report on the agency’s activity over the past year, the release of its 30-page Annual Report and an announcement by long-time executive director Alan Jennings that he will be leaving the agency he has served since 1980 and a report by Board President Wayne Barz on the agency’s preparation for Jennings’ departure. He has served as its executive director since March, 1990.

Jennings officially announced that he will be leaving at the end of May, 2021. About two years ago, Jennings was worried that the quick progression of his Parkinson’s disease would not allow him to reach the earliest retirement age of 63. He informed the Board of Directors then to give them maximum lead time to begin a succession planning process.

He thanked the people of the Lehigh Valley for “making this community better than most” but urged attendees that there’s still work to be done to ensure that we leave nobody behind.

The theme of the program, sponsored by TD Bank and Lehigh Valley Health Network, was “Tough Year. Tough Agency.” Barz noted that although the country and our community have had a very tough year, CACLV is financially stronger and operationally tougher than ever before. He said that the staff and leadership behind Jennings are “ready for whatever the future delivers” including the transition to a new executive director, which is anticipated to occur in the spring.

In response to a question during the live Q&A, Jennings listed a number of new or expanded projects the agency is pursuing. They include hiring an organizer to finally get the city of Bethlehem’s Northside 2027 neighborhood revitalization project under way.

He announced that the agency will more than double its work assisting lower-income and/or minority prospective or existing entrepreneurs start or expand a microenterprise or small business through its federally-certified community development financial institution, The Rising Tide Community Loan Fund. CACLV is moving its technical assistance for new and expanding microbusinesses from its neighborhood-based community development corporations in Allentown and south Bethlehem to The Rising Tide, consolidating all of its business services into a single unit. The total staff complement will go from two to seven people.

The agency expects to start a new Neighborhood Partnership focusing on children and teens in Allentown; if the state approves tax credits, 10 companies will donate $650,000 to the agency’s community development subsidiary in Allentown, generating $650,000 per year for the six-year initiative. As part of the project, the agency plans to build a new youth center in the neighborhood that is between Seventh and Twelfth streets and between Linden and Gordon streets in Allentown. Jennings expects the facility to cost more than $4 million. He would not identify the possible site or sites that they are considering.

Finally, he announced that the agency will be expanding two of its services directed at youth in Bethlehem and Easton to Allentown as part of the Neighborhood Partnership project: Generation Next, which is attempting to reduce the massive disparity in college attendance by graduates of urban high schools compared to suburban schools and; SHE, which works with low-income fifth and sixth-grade girls developing self-esteem and teaching them about the opportunities that await them if they avoid making poor choices as they approach middle school and high school.

Since Jennings joined the agency, its budget has grown 60-fold, from a budget of $500,000 in 1982 to a $30 million budget in the fiscal year that began July 1. He created the Lehigh Valley Food Bank (now the Second Harvest Food Bank), which started in October, 1982. Since then it has distributed more than 150 million pounds of food to people in need.

In 1984, the agency started the Sixth Street Shelter, the largest shelter for homeless families with children in northeast Pennsylvania. Today, the agency operates more than a dozen programs, from homeownership counseling and foreclosure mitigation to small business technical assistance and financing to neighborhood revitalization like façade improvements, creation of pocket parks and planting trees, from rehabbing housing to coaching urban high school students on how to apply for and get accepted into college.

Under Jennings’s leadership, the agency has distinguished itself as one of the top anti-poverty advocates in the country. It has taken on predatory lending, slum landlords, real estate agents, discriminatory land use planning and increasing the minimum wage.

In December, he published a book providing advice for others in the field. The endorsements on the back cover compare Jennings to “David overcoming Goliath” (David Erdman, former editor-in-chief of The Morning Call) and call him “the American version of the Chinese activist who stood alone in front of that tank in Tiananmen Square” (John Taylor, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition). David Bradley, Executive Director of the National Community Action Foundation, who attended CACLV’s Annual Meeting, called Jennings “continuing proof that one determined individual can make a remarkable difference.” Susan Moore, Chief Executive Officer of Community Action Association of PA, said “Alan Jennings is the most visionary, passionate, committed community action leader I know; and his voice, which rings out for justice every single day, will be greatly missed.”