Black Sailboat serves our communities as consulting team dedicated to driving positive community change. Our work revolves around neighborhood revitalization, civic action, and strategic property development. We strive to break status quo and pride ourselves in being a strategic and lively change agent for all communities and individuals we partner with.
Mission
To enrich community with strong relationships, community empowerment, and creative place based strategies.
Approach
We take a small business community betterment approach to everything we set out to do. With a love and commitment to quality service and affordability for our clients, we seek out mission oriented solutions that help our clients & communities optimize their existing resources to make measurable change at scale in as little time as possible.
Principal, Research & Civic Imagination
Our Story
I somehow stumbled into this life, and in it, I finally found belonging.
For the last 17 years of my life, I’ve had the privilege of serving my community through several leadership roles in the local community development scene. It’s funny, I started out as just a young neighbor who just wanted to tear down a few condemned houses next to our neighborhood elementary school. Somewhere along the way, I stepped into a circle of amazing civically minded souls who became far more than mentors to me. They became family.
Over time, this work grew into more than a career; it became my purpose.
I do my best to show up with care and curiosity in every community I’m invited into, guided by a genuine love for building relationships and a deep belief that positive, physical, and measurable change is possible when people work together. I don’t always get it right, but I keep showing up, and I refuse to quit.
All of my work our grounded on an asset-based approach to community development, strengthening communities by building coalitions, designing innovative housing and community programs, and cultivating influential networks of creatives and civic leaders.
Along the way, I’ve overseen five large-scale, multi-million-dollar neighborhood revitalization efforts, facilitated more than 600 community meetings, and served on 12 regional planning initiatives. I’ve also completed five housing development projects within my own personal portfolio and currently steward nearly 1,200 deeply affordable households for families utilizing federal housing assistance.
In 2016, I launched Black Sailboat as a platform to speak honestly about the real, often unaddressed challenges within the field of community work, and to imagine better ways forward. It began as a space rooted in reflection, dialogue, and courage: a refusal to accept that this work had to be rigid, transactional, or disconnected from the people it claims to serve.
In 2018, Black Sailboat expanded into a consulting practice, partnering with a growing network of communities, towns, businesses, and property owners who are willing to go beyond surface solutions and commit to work that actually matters.
Everyone I work with shares one simple thing: a genuine love for their community. Whether I’m working alongside a public agency or a private property owner, the goal is always the same, to move past appearances, slow down when needed, and help build something that can truly last.
Paz y Bien,
Oscar Durán - Community Revitalist
