Technical Assistance sounds so… technical. It’s just a term for helping another organization in an area of expertise that is unfamiliar or for which the organization currently has limited capacity.

photo by Ricardo Miranda

Here are some examples of questions the PLACE Team can help tackle with our experience, reframing the issue to find creative solutions and familiarizing your organization with the tools it can use going forward.

An amended ordinance just changed the site level required to avoid flooding and it applies to our active construction site. How can we comply without tearing down and redesigning?

Our neighborhood is starting to gentrify—how can we prevent displacement of lower-income households and folks of color who are living here and running small businesses?

We’re struggling with “heirs property” challenges within our community. Developers are starting to buy up many little shares of land to aggregate into big projects. The shares are now so divided over generations that individual Black owners, many of whom don’t live here, can’t actually put their property to use. Many are tempted to accept low offers. If they don’t, they are stuck with property taxes for something they can’t use. How can our constituents keep their land and make use of it?

As a developer trying to build quality homes in the same city in which we’ve successfully worked for decades, we’re faced with a new inclusionary housing ordinance with a lot of unfamiliar requirements that seem costly and risky. We’re worried that we have to abandon working there.

As a nonprofit providing healthcare to minority communities, we would like to lower our environmental impact, especially on the surrounding neighborhoods and as our part of addressing climate change. We can’t afford to hire permanent staff to implement changes—how can we make impactful changes and do so within our current operating budget?

Our college is bursting at the seams with the need for affordable student housing, yet the surrounding neighborhoods are pushing back against our expansion and land acquisition is an enormous cost. The increasing percentage of students living off campus erodes immersion in academic and extracurricular activities and increases students’ nonproductive commute time. How can we solve our housing dilemma?

The families who attend our church are living in a food desert. A nearby urban farm is discounting food shares during the summer but in the winter, families are either buying limited, overpriced produce at convenience stores or using the food shelf. We would like to get our congregants ongoing access to affordable, fresh food but we’re a church.

We’re a group of artists whose studio building is going up for sale. We want to buy it so the new owners don’t kick us all out. But we’re artists—we don’t know how to go about this.

These are all problems that PLACE has helped others solve. Our team temporarily fills out your capacity in specific areas.

PLACE provides technical assistance at below-market rates to fellow charities, nonprofits, grass-roots community organizations, or public entities, and at reasonable market rates to others. Once we understand your needs, we will quote fees on an hourly, per-workshop, or package basis. For work that needs to take place flexibly over extended periods, we will quote the scope and make it payable in feasible monthly fees to help you manage risk and resources.