By Scott Martelle

EAST PALO ALTO, CALIF. — Frank Omowale Satterwhite Jr. came of age in the 1960s, initially untouched by the radicalism sweeping the nation. He was busy pursuing his own education back then, laying the foundation for a career that he hoped would culminate in the presidency of one of the nation’s small, traditionally black colleges.

But then Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. The Black Panthers were already expanding into a national movement, Latino activism was “lifting its head,” Haight-Ashbury was the pumping heart of the counter-culture and the anti-Vietnam War movement was filling streets everywhere.

Satterwhite, a graduate student at Stanford University during that pivotal period, took a sudden turn to the political edge.

“I got here in August of ’67 and by December of ’68 I was radical,” Satterwhite says, adding that where others joined militant groups or went underground, he channeled his radicalism into helping the politically marginalized break through systemic barriers. “I decided at that point that I would devote the entire rest of my life to doing community service work.”

It’s been quite a career. Through the National Community Development Institute he founded, Satterwhite, 67, has worked with more than 1,000 organizations in more than 80 distressed neighborhoods to help local residents improve the quality of their own lives, from establishing youth-tutoring programs to making demands on local political structures. 

“The quality of life in the community is a function of the capacity of the social institutions to provide good and services,” Satterwhite says in his office in a converted East Palo Alto garage a few miles from Stanford. “Where the institutions are strong, the community is viable. Where institutions are not strong, a community suffers. So my mission in life ... was to figure out how to build strong and stable organizations in communities of color so that communities of color could fish for themselves.” 

Satterwhite is now applying that experience to T he Skillman Foundation’s 10-year, $100- million Good Neighborhoods program targeting the lives of some 65,000 children in six Detroit neighborhoods.

Satterwhite’s role is a mix of evangelist and team-builder, using three decades of experience to help residents in the six Detroit neighborhoods — Vernor and Chadsey/Condon in Southwest Detroit; Brightmoor and Cody/Rouge on the west side, Northend in the heart of the city and Osborne, in the northeast — band together for their common good. It’s a time-consuming process that begins with community meetings then moves into goal-setting, leadership training and eventually making targeted demands on the local political structures.

Satterwhite thinks the Detroit project stands a solid chance of success because it incorporates crucial ingredients for a “Community Change Initiative.” Specifically, he says, the project is backed by a long-term commitment by The Skillman Foundation and targets a defined geographic area and population, focuses on specific policy issues and goals (defined by consensus in meetings with local residents), draws in local institutions to address neighborhood needs while building broad partnerships, documents the gains and helps identify and nurture local leadership to continue to push for change.

It’s the development of leadership that makes the key difference, Satterwhite believes, as well as getting local activists to view themselves as more than case-by-case problem solvers.

“When they see the potential for evolving their own role, the light bulb comes on,” Satterwhite says. 

It’s also a tried-and-true method that got its start three decades ago.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Satterwhite did his undergraduate work at Howard University, earned his master’s from Southern Illinois University then his doctorate at Stanford. Satterwhite worked in education for a few years and eventually became a deputy superintendent in the East Palo Alto School District, covering an unincorporated area of San Mateo County on the southwest shore of San Francisco Bay. 

But by 1979 he was out of the education bureaucracy and a fulltime East Palo Alto community activist, creating a University Without Walls program for fellow organizers that eventually gave rise to the National Community Development Institute. The initial intent: To give structure to his work in East Palo Alto, which included helping lead the way to incorporating the disorganized and politically marginalized community into the City of East Palo Alto. 

“East Palo Alto became the perfect learning laboratory where I could work on these really intractable issues and questions and learn how to address them and then figure out how to then share what I was learning,” says Satterwhite.  At only 2.5 square miles, East Palo Alto is small, but it faces many of the same problems – from lower graduation rates, high unemployment and lack of infrastructure investment – as large urban cores, Satterwhite says.  “It’s a typical urban center. It just doesn’t have the scale of dysfunction” of major cities, he says. “But the type of dysfunction is very comparable.”

Satterwhite began by organizing community meetings that drew more than 300 people, a process that culminated in the creation of the City of East Palo Alto – with Satterwhite serving as a member of the City Council. Sharifa Wilson is a former mayor of East Palo Alto, and she has seen Satterwhite in action countless times. In private conversations he is soft spoken and given to speaking in long paragraphs full of the language of the nonprofit world – “stakeholders” and “capacity building.” But in public meetings he comes alive, a showman and proselytizer all at once, imbuing audiences with a sense of optimism, and hope. One supporter, East Palo Alto community leader Faye C. McNair-Knox, likens his presentation to going to church.

“I love his technique,” Wilson says. 

Wilson watched nearly a decade ago as Satterwhite helped create One East Palo Alto, a local nonprofit that identifies youth needs and builds programs to address them. The organization began after nine months of Saturday meetings in which local residents slowly determined what problems most challenged their community, and together built programs and campaigns to address them. 

It’s the same template being applied to the Detroit program.

“When you can keep that many people coming every Saturday that’s the key,” Wilson says. “I love his energy and his enthusiasm … He uses it in a way that brings people into the process and allows them to get engaged.”

Four years ago, the organization noticed that an unusual number of crimes were being committed by teens. It drew together community members and devised a jobs program targeting at-risk kids. With wages coming from foundation grants, One East Palo Alto placed youths in entry-level positions with local employers, which has helped the teens fill idle hours, involved them in constructive work environments and gave them a chance to earn money. Crime receded. And local businesses, some of which had been growing distant from the community, re-connected, says McNair-Knox, One East Palo Alto’s executive director.

“He really is the template for the work that we do,” McNair-Knox says.  “We give him all the credit.”

— Scott Martelle is an Irvine, Calif.-based journalist and author of “Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.”