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Over the past 13 years, Bob Schall has played a key role in one of America’s community economic development success stories. Since 1985, Schall has worked for the Center for Community Self-Help in Durham, North Carolina. Self-Help is a $210 million financial institution that provides expanded economic opportunities to low-wealth households and communities through innovative and specialized lending for home ownership and small business development. Schall says "We are a ‘laboratory’ for financing programs that support community development, testing new models, and advocating for change in the private and public sectors."

Schall has performed many jobs at Self-Help. Currently he manages the Self-Help Ventures Fund, a non-profit corporation that makes commercial loans to small businesses and non-profit organizations, develops and manages real estate, and purchases affordable home mortgages from banks for re-sale to secondary markets. He also directs Self-Help’s commercial lending programs.

After graduating from DCRP in 1978, Schall worked on short-term consulting jobs in the Triangle and Boston for a year. In 1979, he began working for the North Carolina Division of Community Assistance, an agency that assists city and county governments on community development programs. There he helped local governments utilize and package federal programs for local economic development projects. In 1982, he left that program to get some local small business experience, joining a small cooperative food distributor in Durham, where he was financial manager. Schall began working for Self-Help in 1985, when it had just four employees and roughly $60,000 in assets. Schall says there have been ample opportunities for career growth at Self-Help, as the organization has grown considerably in size and complexity over the past 13 years.

Schall didn’t attend DCRP with a specific job or career in mind, but with an interest in the field of local economic development. While at DCRP, he began to formulate some ideas of his career plans. Some areas of study that particularly interested him were employee and cooperative ownership, labor market policy and programs, and non-traditional housing programs. He says, "As a result, I imagined I would attempt to work with a small non-profit or public agency that had a particular interest in these areas." He had no concept of what jobs were available in this field, but thought that he would find the best possible fit after his first several jobs.

Schall’s favorite thing about DCRP was the "culture" of the place: "there were many students and faculty that were interested in, and supported programs and policies that addressed social and economic problems." He says that with its separate locale (i.e. New East building) and relatively small student body, students and faculty discussed planning questions and ideas constantly. This culture enhanced his motivation and zeal to make the most out of his two years at DCRP.

Although he values his DCRP experience, Schall says, "for the most part, the technical skills required for my professional jobs after graduation were not learned at DCRP — they were learned on the job. And that is as it should be. There are just too many technical skills in the range of professions DCRP grads gravitate to, and those techniques change too frequently, for the department to be a competent technical school." However, he says there are some exceptions, such as statistics. He adds that the department’s flexibility in encouraging students to attend specialized classes in other schools (such as public health, law, and business) provides a great way to let students learn more specialized technical skills elsewhere.

Schall says that DCRP provided a curriculum that gave students the opportunity to learn about a broad range of programs and policies in economic and community development, which gave him a good "birds eye view" of the field and an appreciation for the breadth of approaches available and the challenges of addressing these social problems.

Schall predicts that the economic development field will both expand and change over the coming years: "The field will have more players of all types — for-profit, non-profit, and public sector agencies." He thinks that the public sector role will diminish to, at most, a facilitating role in which it helps to create or supports other economic development organizations. Schall thinks this will happen because of the public’s general lack of confidence in the government’s ability to efficiently and effectively implement programs. "Consequently, there will be an increasing proliferation of local and regional initiatives, some of which are successful, and many of which are not." He adds that "The public sector will have to improve its ability to be clear about what it wants from these programs, evaluate their performance, and direct support accordingly. For-profit and non-profit groups that are entrepreneurial and politically astute will thrive in this environment. Economic development professionals will need to be competent in many areas and stay abreast of the many innovations that will be occurring around them."