By: Dara Eskridge, CEO
As an organization committed to a clear end date (2042), we are constantly viewing time in three directions: what we seeded in the past that we can nurture in the present to yield meaning in the future. Looking back, in 2024, I was nagged by the question of enough (effort, understanding, care, ingenuity, investment, etc.). What a difference a year makes.
When 2025 began, we were rounding home on the first phase of our 20-year timeline (Laying the Foundation). It was to be a final year of slow and steady, marked by calm and clarity. But 2025 had much, much more in mind. Driving northbound to a meeting on May 16, I watched the sky turn heavy with green. Team members were watching the same from our office windows. In the miles of neighborhoods between us, in barely an hour, the very heart of Black St. Louis would be forever changed. For so many families and communities alike, plans and dreams were shaken loose and scattered with no roadmap for what was next. But the years of forged relationships, shared memories, kind gestures, and aligned purpose remained in the soil. And like those families, thousands of neighbors, and countless organizations, we put it all to work.
Freshly inked investment partnerships were leveraged to provide collective care through the 4theVille Emergency Hub, anchored by 4theVille, Invest STL, and Dream Builders 4 Equity in daily collaboration with Action St. Louis and ForTheCultureSTL for The People’s Response. Instead of launching new pilots as intended, we doubled down on our learnings from previous efforts and launched the Northside Resilience Fund with capital from longtime backers and new supporters, all seeking to provide timely, flexible cash aid for our neighbors navigating the unimaginable. And the Small Dollars Action Fund, delivered in partnership with SLACO, was a steady source for residents organizing, showing up for, and doing as they saw best for their neighborhoods. The pace and scale at which we’ve tried new ways of doing (resident-led planning, Rooted, Small Dollars Action Fund, etc.) and accelerated development and usefulness of key relationships prepared us to be nimble and responsive immediately following the tornado. There was enough familiarity and credibility for us within the ecosystem and the community to be a collaborator and steward of meaningful action in the midst of major unknowns.
Our actions post-tornado only heightened and broadened our relationships, understanding, utility, and credibility, setting a firm foundation for our arc. Indeed, it was 85% good enough to show up with and for our community and launch us into the next phase of our 20-year timeline: rapid trying of bold ideas with purpose. Now, those careful plans that were swept up into a whirl and rightly set aside are being dusted off and retooled in a year that makes them even more relevant and urgent for the present and the future. For Invest STL, our 2026 forecast includes:
- A compliment to the continuum of resident-focused trainings offered in the region by way of our place-based Neighborhood Action Incubator to strengthen and catalyze networks of residents organizing and moving together to shape their neighborhoods
- Our first trying of a Neighborhood Storytelling Practice, a collective-centered invitation for residents to uncover, bring forward and amplify their own experiences of being in and keeping a place together
- A pilot effort to restore value to homes in legacy Black neighborhoods, with the intentions of providing families with the equity needed to affirm home as their generational wealth cornerstone
- Elasticity and spaciousness to show up and do as best we know how alongside so many other committed organizations and residents, to forge a future for North City, unfogged by the tornado’s debris
It turns out just enough was there all along, waiting to prove itself when the time called for it. Our foundation is set, firm enough yet a little spongy for the give that’s required to be the most useful with what and who we have in responding to the moment at hand, while not losing shape or intention for our mission. In 2025, practicing our principles and not sticking to rigid formulas revealed the integrity of what we’ve cultivated so far. In 2026, it will illuminate the new possible, one untethered from the past and reaching toward a community worthy of our lifetime.
Principles, not formulas.
