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Spirited Development

Rev. Michael Chapman of St. John the Baptist Entrepreneurship and Leadership Training Facility.

Pastor presses on with $500M neighborhood initiative
- by Tracey Drury

Companies complain all the time about the difficulty of recruiting and retaining quality workers, while thousands of people struggle to find good-paying jobs.

The Rev. Michael Chapman is working on solutions to both problems. He's doing it while advancing a $500 million development for the Fruit Belt neighborhood on Buffalo's East Side.

"This is going to be a major initiative in putting minorities to work," he says. "This will create 15,000 jobs over the next 10 years. There's not another project like this anywhere in the country."

Though Chapman is best known as pastor of St. John the Baptist Church downtown, he wears many hats with more than a dozen nonprofit corporations affiliated with the church, including a private Christian school, a charter school, property development and maintenance organizations.

Chapman first detailed the expansive development plans one year ago. They include relocating 150 residents at the McCarley Gardens subsidized housing complex into new townhouses scattered throughout the Fruit Belt, and also the construction of senior residential buildings, a youth facility and an entrepreneurial business training facility.

Sitting down recently to deliver an update on the projects, Chapman closes his eyes, offering a blessing. With a gray beard and twinkling eyes, Chapman is filled with energy and excitement. He's a deeply spiritual man, but also one who recognizes there are plenty of problems in the city and isn't waiting around for anyone else to offer up solutions.

"This is not about making money. This is about putting people to work," he says. "We're investing the developer fees into the project to put people back to work as opposed to generating profit."

Several pieces are already underway: In August, the organization began leasing warehouse space at Jefferson and High streets, where it now houses the church's corporate offices, a church boxing team and the Fruit Belt East Side Leadership & Business Academy. Renovations were helped along by a $50,000 community reinvestment grant from HSBC Bank.

In January, plans were submitted to the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal on the plan to develop 49 townhouses. Chapman expects to hear back on the proposal in June. The project will be built by the St. John Fruit Belt Community Development Corp., then managed through SJ Realty Corp.

But the plan, at its core, is about creating jobs and opportunity. But that first means getting support from both the private and public sector.

Though he is the point person who speaks on all of the development plans, Chapman points to a two-inch-thick packet listing dozens of organizations that provide input, including M&T Bank, the John R. Oishei Foundation, the Buffalo Employment & Training Center, the Buffalo Urban League, educators from the University at Buffalo as well as construction management firms such as SLR Contracting, Lamparelli Construction and Turner Construction Co.

Step one includes identifying what jobs will actually be created, then recruiting unemployed individuals from the city and providing them with five months of job training, after which they'll be put to work developing the first townhouse projects. The church and its affiliated groups will absorb all costs in the development and training phase, Chapman says.

SLR Contracting has worked with St. John the Baptist on past projects, including doing the renovation of the St. John Towers senior housing complex. Sundra Ryce, SLR president, calls Chapman a visionary.

"What Reverend Chapman has set up is a very aggressive initiative to provide access and opportunities for males in the Fruit Belt community and beyond," she says. "What this program will provide at the end of the day will be trained individuals who can work on a variety of construction projects throughout Western New York."

Chapman has traveled to Washington, D.C., to make presentations on the plan to the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development and at national Baptist ministers conferences.

"We are on the radar screen," he says.

Plenty of people have big ideas, but in this case, others are definitely taking notice. Members of the development community say it's definitely ambitious, but definitely doable.

"It's huge, a gigantic project," says Joan Spilman, acting field office director for HUD for upstate New York. Having lots of collaboration and involvement from the private sector also gives the project a better chance of securing HUD funding, she says.

"This is built on a model that HUD likes to see, a comprehensive approach. It involves all those pieces that history shows are keys to success in this kind of stuff."

The jobs created through the construction project are just one of three separate jobs-related initiatives underway.

The Leadership & Business Academy includes about a dozen men between the ages of 21 and 42 who have been hired as executive trainees, receiving salaries beginning at $25,000. They shadow Chapman, helping coordinate the larger development project, while developing business plans of their own to help support other affiliated programs.

The Entrepreneurship and Leadership Training Facility at Jefferson and High serves as their home base, housing a fundraising distribution business for bottled water and toiletries.

This summer the trainees will be running weekly bingo programs, a dozen sanctioned boxing matches at the Rev. Dr. Bennett W. Smith Sr. Family Life Center, as well as a series of X-Box 360 Madden Football tournaments for adult video gamers.

"What we're trying to do is show these young men how to create community wealth and improve the quality of life for the community," Chapman says.

A second leadership development program will target 100 boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 15, offering a 13-year mentorship program. Twice-a-month sessions will include leadership and business training, spirituality, culinary, language as well as supplemental educational services.

"We believe these will be the young leaders who will oversee the leadership and business community 13 years from now," Chapman says. "We closing the vacuum we so often have in our community in not training anyone to take our places. This is the succession plan."

Barbara Nevergold, a senior education specialist at UB and co-founder of the Uncrowned Queens Institute, is developing an evaluative component to determine the progress made by program participants.

She also served previously as director for workforce development programs at UB's Educational Opportunity Center, and says the beauty of Chapman's program is that it includes so many components.

"Workforce development isn't only about workplace readiness," she says. "It's about developing good work ethics and giving them an opportunity to put those skills to work in a real life situation."

"I think that Rev. Chapman's idea is to reach more the hardcore unemployed who may have gone through programs of this sort and didn't succeed, and give them more hands-on assistance," she says.

Development of even more workforce programs are underway: Chapman is meeting with Erie Community College to discuss expanding ECC's auto technology curriculum from Orchard Park into the downtown area, possibly at a St. John's facility.

With so many balls in the air, does adding more to the mix hurt Chapman's opportunities for success? ECC president Jack Quinn says no.

"That's for them to decide," he says. "But ECC didn't get there overnight and the same is true with this demonstration program. If we can start it and get it going, it can have some successes."