Wholeness
At FCE, we believe that wholeness is the fundamental measure of a city’s (or a nation’s) success. Wholeness means that each person has an equal opportunity to achieve financial success, each person is equally self-sufficient, and each person is equally active in political and civic life—regardless of income or neighborhood.

Disparity is the opposite of wholeness. The greater the disparity in opportunity, self-sufficiency, and engagement from the richest to the poorest neighborhoods, the less whole the city is. Wholeness is a moral and political imperative, but data strongly suggest that it is also an economic imperative. That is, cities and regions with less disparity enjoy better overall economic growth—and spend less on prisons, emergency medical care and other band-aids for disparity—than those that are less whole.

Moral Grounding
FCE is not a faith-based organization, but individually and collectively we work from a moral and ethical impulse to live out the call that is central to the world’s great religions—to be of service to our neighbors who suffer material, emotional and spiritual deprivation. We welcome partnerships with faith-based organizations as well as secular ones, and we challenge all people of faith to take seriously their obligation to embrace and help the forgotten and the despised.

Asset-based solutions
In the past, most community-building efforts focused on what low-income people can’t do for themselves rather than what they can do. FCE takes a different approach, one that is “asset-based” rather than “needs-based.”

FCE recognizes that the most distressed neighborhoods have many people who are talented, resourceful, caring, and determined. We bring them together to figure out what they want for their community and to identify the assets in their midst. We work simultaneously to engage the people and institutions in the city that wield influence and control resources, showing them the mutual benefits to be gained by partnering with their less affluent neighbors.

Conversations about needs involve givers and receivers, winners and losers; conversations about maximizing assets involve equals who collaborate around mutual goals.

Place-based solutions
Poverty exists everywhere, but each community has unique challenges and capabilities. In keeping with FCE’s core belief that solutions must come from within rather than be imposed from without, our approach is place-based. Specifically, we work in South Dallas. While every action we take, every piece of research we do, and every neighborhood we work in provides lessons to make us more effective, we never take a cookie-cutter approach. Effective community empowerment is about relationships, and relationships are largely about listening.

Data-driven solutions
For as long as people have debated the causes and cures of poverty, the discussion has been largely fueled by anecdotes, assumptions, and personal biases. Data, when it was cited, was often aggregated at the county, metro, state, or national level, giving little insight into the reality of particular communities.

FCE and its research arm, the J. McDonald Williams Institute, bring the most rigorous, technologically sophisticated tools to gathering, analyzing and disseminating data about our partner neighborhoods. And that gives our community building a firm factual foundation, supplanting emotion, assumptions and stereotypes.

Focus on Results
We are responsible—to the people we serve, the organizations we collaborate with, the citizens of Dallas, and the people and institutions that give us money—not just for good intentions and hard work but for results.  FCE is not out to validate a certain ideology or approach.  Our goal is to do what works; we strive constantly to measure our performance, to be flexible, to learn, to adapt and to improve.

Democratization of Data
Information is power, so one way to empower all citizens—and especially the disenfranchised—is by giving them easy access to the best available data about their communities.  FCE and the Williams Institute do that in multiple ways.

Dallas Indicators is a web-based tool that reports how the entire Dallas Metropolitan Statistical Area is performing on 10 key indicators of wholeness and wellbeing.  Another web-based tool, Analyze Dallas, lets users display—either as numbers or maps—demographic, economic, and other data, down to the level of individual census tracts within the city of Dallas. 

Best Practices
FCE is always on the alert for ways to improve our operations based on the best practices not only of other community development organizations but the wider corporate world.  In turn, we educate our community partners and help them adopt best practices to make them more efficient and effective.

FCE, 2001 Ross Avenue, Suite 3350, Dallas, TX 75201, 469-221-0700