Early Tuesday afternoon, a community town hall meeting was held within the conference room of The Hank Sanders Technology Center at Wallace Community College in Selma. 

Several community members came out to the free discussion to hear from members of PERC Selma with the focus being on community development, infrastructure, economic development including environmental concerns.

“PERC Selma is the partnership for equitable and resilient communities,” said Lydia Chatmon, who is the program director for The Selma Center for Nonviolence. 

Chatmon told the community through the town hall meeting, they have five core community partners and one of the partners that they had, to speak during the meeting was LISC.

LISC is a non-profit organization that dedicates their efforts to building strong community partnerships and connecting “hard-to-tap” public and private resources with under-invested places.

With Selma, the organization has been working within the Selma community for about two years and according to Chatmon, she said they started a day before the Jan. 12 tornado hit the community. 

“Which shifted the original plans for the work that they were scheduled to do and now we are coming back around to it,” Chatmon said.

Ethan Guy, who is from the LISC non-profit told members within the meeting that they are affiliated with HUD’s Technical Assistance Program and that their work started off within the Housing and Economic Development and then was shifted to Roadside Disaster Response and Recovery, which led to them becoming a Community Development Finance Institute.

“We are one of the largest community banks in the United States,” Guy said to the community. What that means is our background is in finance and funding.”

Because the non-profit does specialize in finance and funding, Guy talked to the public about areas within the city that new market tax credits are eligible for and he also released some news to the public that Selma has never had a new market credit before. 

“so, our biggest question is why is that? How can we change that?” Guy said. Because these aren’t things that we have to make you eligible for. There’s a lot that has to happen in order to access these funds, but that’s why we are here.”

During the meeting, Guy also went over with the public about opportunity zones for the city, the discussion of CDFI, which is a bank that’s been designed specifically to make sure of mission based funding that caters to driving community development.

Guy also gave a presentation that included phases of what Selma could like with their partnership over the next couple of years.

Alongside the City of Selma, a presentation was given by City Collective and Sekou Cooke Studio with an open discussion following with Danielle Wooten, who is the city’s Planning and Development Director. 

Many residents were engaged with the meeting including one resident named Hollie Hopkins, who said at first, she was unsure of the meeting and its purpose but after it was over, she said she was glad she came.

“I’m really glad I did get a chance to attend this meeting, especially with me coming in and looking around and seeing all the older people here and just knowing that I’m the youngest person in the room, it kind of gave me a feeling of uncertainty but I’m actually glad I did get a chance to come because I have learned a lot of information and things that I didn’t know and things that I’ve been looking forward to getting to know about,” Hopkins said.

 “I was like, well, maybe it’s God that sent me here to the meeting or maybe it’s just a step towards my future life of what I’m going to actually achieve in life, so like I said, I’m really glad I attended.”

Hopkins also told The Selma Times Journal that she actually looks forward to the next meeting that the city has and she said she thinks she is going to start coming out to more community engagement events more often as she knows about them.

“I most definitely would encourage my peers, my elders, and just people working all the time that don’t have the time to attend meetings like this, to come and I would most definitely tell them about it and even share the word throughout my community.”