New Leadership, New Neighborhoods, Same Vision
Written by Tim Buckley, May 2026
CBEL began with conversations between Jim Seymour and Larry Tokarski (Mountain West Investment Corp.) in 2019. That same year, the duo convened 200 community leaders from various sectors together to brainstorm ways to improve community wellness.
Initially a startup under Tokarski’s Center for Community Excellence, CBEL entered 2026 as a nonprofit organization. Still receiving financial nourishment from Tokarski’s philanthropic generosity, CBEL has begun to attract significant funding from other sources, companies and foundations who see the value in its neighborhood resiliency work. From one neighborhood in 2020, CBEL now encompasses seven neighborhoods, approximately 15,000 households and seven Title 1 elementary schools.
On July 1st, Jim Seymour will “move on” from his role as CBEL’s founding director, yet remain active on its board. Eduardo Angulo, who was hired in 2020 to head CBEL’s Neighborhood Family Council operations, has been named CBEL’s next executive director.
“Building resilience in Salem and Keizer as a whole starts with neighborhoods experiencing the most adversity,” Angulo said. His career as a community organizer and advocate for quality education includes having co-founded the Salem Keizer Coalition for Equality in 1999.
“We owe a great deal of gratitude to Jim Seymour,” Angulo said. “His success with CBEL comes towards the end of a remarkable career that includes his guiding Catholic Community Services and its foundation for more than 40 years. His early years as a troubled kid from a poor and broken family in Yamhill County helped inspire his compassion and drive to empower struggling families in Marion County.”
Angulo continued, “Jim’s effectiveness as a leader comes from a vision that building strong families is the bedrock of a healthy city,” Angulo continued. "Following other pioneers in community resilience, like Harlem’s Children Zone, CBEL empowers under-performing neighborhoods and nurtures a new generation of leaders who also come from families with challenging pasts.”
The center of CBEL’s early success is the growing network of neighborhood family councils, made up of volunteers who determine how best to implement their desired outcomes. “We train Councils to be self-governing, then amplify their voices and their choices in the halls of power,” Angulo said. “What starts locally as social cohesion soon translates into social capital, then political and financial capital.”
Common themes among the Councils, which reflect CBEL’s mission and vision, include safe streets and parks, healthy families, quality education and economic prosperity. Among the early signs that the CBEL resiliency model is working include:
A restored, active city park once dangerous and nearly derelict
Civic engagement, enhanced by more than 200 volunteers
Dozens of neighborhood events that attract thousands of families and dozens of partner nonprofit and civic organizations each year
Better student attendance in elementary schools and increased parent involvement
Popular classes for parents and children – i.e. emotional literacy and play groups
Frequent “grassroots meet grass tops” gatherings that increase socio/political ties
Direct engagement with at-risk youth in a city-wide violence reduction initiative
Being an incubator for new generational leadership among neighborhood families
A platform for new business startups from newly empowered neighborhoods.
Seymour’s next project will involve another Tokarski funded effort, working with multiple partners to further the push for affordable housing, specifically aimed at finding homes for first-time buyers through downpayment assistance and other cost-reducing strategies.
“The CBEL Board was unanimous in its support of hiring Eduardo as my replacement,” Seymour said. "The trust and confidence that he has established with our CBEL neighborhoods is remarkable, and a key reason we’ve accomplished so much in the past five years.”
The neighborhoods around Yoshikai and Richmond elementary schools are the newest to join the CBEL network. The five others are neighborhoods surrounding the Hallman, Kennedy, Washington, Cummings, and Highland elementary schools.