“I think Joe’s looking down, saying, ‘Well, it’s a good start.’”

That’s how Susan Lloyd, the executive director of the Zilber Family Foundation, described the progress being made in carrying out a $50 million commitment to revitalizing specific Milwaukee neighborhoods made by the late philanthropist, Joseph Zilber.

At an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Marquette Law School on Thursday, Lloyd described the work of the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative, launched in 2008. The initiative is focused on two neighborhoods, Lindsay Heights on the north side and the Clarke Square on the south side.

Zilber, a real estate developer who died in March 2010, saw opportunity everywhere he went, Lloyd said, and was eager to see new vitality in places such as Lindsay Heights, where his childhood home was.

But achieving that, especially in trying economic times, is not a short-term matter.

“There’s a certain element of building the road as you walk on it,” she said, describing how things were going. But there is definite progress. Tangible results range from the initiative’s role in bringing together school leaders in Lindsay Heights to collaborate on how to improve educational opportunities for children in the area to launching the first all-Hmong youth football team in the Clarke Square area. And, she said, the initiative has “gotten traction on 11 game-changing real estate ventures.”

People in the neighborhoods have identified their top priorities for the initiative, with safe streets and good education at the top and decent housing and safe youth recreation programs not far behind.

Lloyd outlined the strategy being used in helping the two communities, beginning with supporting the efforts of leaders of trusted community organizations in each area, and continuing with efforts to involve people who live and work in the areas in efforts to change and provide technical assistance and support from outside organizations for development efforts.

So far, Lloyd said, the initiative has awarded $12 million and paid out $5 million It has “leveraged” an additional $11 million in funding from others for efforts in the two neighborhoods, with about $3 million more pending.

Gousha asked Lloyd to compare her work in Milwaukee to similar work she did previously in Chicago. She said in Chicago, people identify strongly with the neighborhood where they live, while in Milwaukee, people think in much broader terms when asked where they live (“the north side,” for example) and identify less with specific locales. There are a lot more neighborhood development organization in Chicago, but they are more competitive with each other than in Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, she said, “people really want to work together and see change.”

There is a long way to go in efforts in the neighborhoods, and Lloyd said she wanted the initiative to continue to focus on the two areas for perhaps several years before it considers launching efforts elsewhere in the city.

Her long term goal? She said it was to see the neighborhoods – and others in the city – achieve a quality of life that would leave her with a tough time deciding which of them to choose for her own home.