This information is from the:
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Located at: http://www.cpn.org/cpn/sections/topics/community/civic_perspectives/cb_coming_of_age1.html
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G. Thomas Kingsley
Joseph B. McNeely
James O. Gibson
The Development Training Institute, Inc.
The Urban Institute
1997
The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and the Development
Training Institute, Inc. and not necessarily of The Urban Institute, its
trustees, or its sponsors.
Chapter 1: Context and Convergence
Chapter 2: Themes of the New Community Building
Chapter 3: Recommendations: Supporting Broader Application of Effective Community Building
Appendix: Community Building Series Panelist and Staff
Community building: an idea that is beginning to resonate across a surprising range of America's leadership as the 20th century draws to a close. In mid- 1995, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development jointly funded a project to broaden understanding of community building and its implications. The work of the project -- implemented by the Development Training Institute (DTI) and the Urban Institute -- centered around six seminars which examined the historic movements out of which today's community building practice is evolving. Seminar participants included community building practitioners, interested researchers, foundation representatives, and federal and local officials.
Project sponsors called for the preparation of two written products. The first is a book consisting of the papers commissioned for the seminars, and commentary presented at the seminars, along with additional essays that help to put these materials in context. Sponsors recognized that while the historic movements discussed are relevant to today's policy, no one volume exists telling their stories, and exploring interrelationships and directions, all in one place. The book should place community initiatives in perspective in a manner that can serve both as a guide to policy and practice and to orient a new generation of practitioners.
The project's second product is this monograph, which attempts to explain more cogently what community building is, and to develop recommendations on how it might best be supported. Here, we draw not only on discussions and papers from the seminars, but also on a small but growing literature describing recent community building efforts and contemplating their potentials.
This first draft of this monograph was prepared by a small team of DTI and Urban Institute staff who participated in the project (G. Thomas Kingsley, Joseph B. McNeely, and James O. Gibson). The draft was then presented for review to a core panel that had participated in all of the earlier seminars (see Appendix). The panel was convened for a full-day meeting to offer comments, discuss options, and consider changes. We cannot say that all panel members fully endorse all that is said in this revised monograph, but there was broad support for its basic arguments and recommendations as now written.
We do not conclude here that community building is a panacea. Community building cannot provide all of the jobs or other opportunities that will be needed to diminish poverty and social isolation in this country. But there are many case experiences showing that community building initiatives can make an important difference in people's lives; that they can enhance opportunities for those now impoverished and, probably more important, equip them much more powerfully to take advantage of opportunities that become available to them. We think this is enough (even without a longer track record and more formal evaluation) to warrant describing the new convergence of ideas about community building clearly and disseminating them so they can be considered and scrutinized by a broad range of actors concerned with the future of our society.
This monograph discusses a new approach that is emerging to help address the problems and opportunities of both impoverished inner-city neighborhoods and rural areas. Most of its practitioners are now calling it community building. It works by building community in individual neighborhoods: neighbors learning to rely on each other, working together on concrete tasks that take advantage of new self-awareness of their collective and individual assets and, in the process, creating human, family, and social capital that provides a new base for a more promising future and reconnection to America's mainstream.
It is not a uniformly defined methodology; different themes dominate its application in different places. It has not been fully evaluated or even tested at a broad scale. And it is not totally new -- a number of its component techniques have been in use individually for decades.
Nonetheless, good reasons exist to describe the approach as significant, and to make people concerned with social policy across the country more aware of it. While advocates often disagree about the nuances of how community building should be applied, there is a growing consensus on a number of basic themes. Those themes are woven together in a way that sets the new community building apart quite clearly from neighborhood-based programs of the past. And community-building initiatives claim credit for many individual successes: stories of dramatic turnarounds in attitudes and accomplishments in seemingly hopeless environments. Stories that are striking, particularly given a public dialogue that has been so overwhelmingly pessimistic about the prospects for poor communities.
Probably the feature that most starkly contrasts community building with approaches to poverty alleviation that have been typical in America over the past half-century is that its primary aim is not simply giving more money, services, or other material benefits to the poor. While most of its advocates recognize a continuing need for considerable outside assistance (public and private), community building's central theme is to obliterate feelings of dependency and to replace them with attitudes of self-reliance, self-confidence, and responsibility. It gives high priority to establishing and reinforcing sound values. And these are not ideas being imposed from the outside -- they are what the leaders of distressed neighborhoods across the nation themselves are saying they want to see accomplished.
Community building strategies can make a significant difference. There is now evidence of many cases where the residents of poor communities have dramatically changed their circumstances by organizing to assume responsibility for their own destinies. For example:
Policy interest is growing because of an increased awareness of the importance of community. It may seem surprising that the successes described above have occurred in the context of today's urban poverty. By 1990, Americans had all but given up on the inner cities. Over the preceding decade the media had fed them accounts of seemingly pervasive social disorder: vanishing two-parent families, mushrooming rates of teen-pregnancy, the crack epidemic, murders and other crimes, mounting gang disruption, schools out of control, welfare dependency, deepening unemployment and poverty. Some began to believe that all of this was a product of a different culture -- a different set of values -- but that view has clearly been undermined.
Interest in community-based approaches to addressing inner-city problems has been buttressed indirectly by the prominence of recent literature on the importance of stronger civil society and community life for America as a whole. This has emphasized that the existence of networks of nongovernmental civic institutions is vital to the performance of governance at all levels. But more basically, it has reminded us how critical neighborhood level institutions (e.g., associations, churches) and friendship networks are to families and children everywhere -- neighbors who know and trust each other, watching over each others' children, maintaining and reinforcing values, providing mutual support in times of need, providing contacts to help each other find and take advantage of outside opportunities, and assuming responsibility for action when threats and opportunities affecting common interests arise.
Community-based initiatives are spreading and practice is beginning to converge around common themes. Major community improvement experiments managed by the federal government (e.g., Model Cities, the Community Action Program) were phased out in the 1970s. Since then, however, there has been a substantial expansion of nongovernmental initiatives in low-income communities, particularly after the Reagan-era cutbacks in urban assistance. The strengthening of local Community Development Corporations (CDCs) -- which have focused on the construction and rehabilitation of housing -- and the creation of strong national intermediaries to support CDC programs may be most noteworthy in this regard. But many other community-level associations have been created to address other issues: e.g., fighting drugs and crime, securing better social services, school improvement, finding and creating jobs, and confronting local governments and other outsiders on projects residents think would threaten their interests. National foundations have been prominent in funding these activities, but local business and philanthropic groups have also been important, as has indirect assistance through a number of special-purpose federal and state programs and block grants.
Although there are no precise measures, there are indications that community based action is accelerating in the 1990s. There is also evidence that the approaches of practitioners who come out of very different backgrounds are beginning to converge. CDCs are now reaching out and working with residents to address a broad range of social issues beyond housing. Community organizers who once focused only on "fighting city hall" are now also working on constructive self-help projects and partnering with outside agencies. Neighborhood leaders are now working together with Police Departments on community policing programs and partnering with city agencies in social service delivery. National foundations are sponsoring comprehensive community initiatives in neighborhoods of several cities that attempt to bring together the many strands of the new approach. Local foundations (e.g., in Cleveland and Boston) have sponsored the development of city-wide strategies based on the community building approach and a number of city governments are adapting their own programs to work with community associations as partners.
Looking over these experiences, we believe that seven themes define the essence of the new community building. They also show how today's approaches contrast with narrower neighborhood programs of the past and help explain how they can work most effectively. Today's community building needs to be:
(1) Focused around specific improvement initiatives in a manner that
reinforces values and builds social and human capital. Like the leaders
of past neighborhood initiatives, today's community builders spend most of
their time working with their neighbors on productive activities to which
they give priority, whether it is cleaning up a vacant lot, planning a
housing project, trying to improve school quality, or mounting a citizen's
patrol to prevent crime. But compared to their predecessors, they give more
emphasis to broader objectives of such activities: building the friendships,
mutual trust, institutions, and capacity that form the social capital
that is, in turn, essential to fundamentally strengthening the lives of
families and individual human beings. And they act purposefully to assure
that opportunities to achieve these deeper objectives are taken advantage
of. They value cleaning up a vacant lot and building a new housing project,
but they will not be satisfied until they have created an environment in
which children grow up strong so that no more of them will be lost to gangs
and drugs.
(2) Community-driven with broad resident involvement. It social
capital is to be built -- if attitudes of dependency are to be replaced with
those of self-reliance -- community residents must largely do it for
themselves. "Community participation" is not enough. The community must play
the central role in devising and implementing strategies for its own
improvement. This does not mean that outside facilitators cannot help show
them the way, or that they cannot accept outside help or accomplish goals by
partnering with outside agencies, but neighborhood residents must feel that
they "own" the improvement process. Success also depends on a substantial
share of the residents being directly involved in that process. Community
leaders must consistently reach out for broad involvement and avoid becoming
a remote elite themselves.
(3) Comprehensive, strategic and entrepreneurial. Impoverished
neighborhoods are beset by multiple, interrelated challenges. Ultimately,
all of them (crime prevention, better education, jobs, physical improvement,
etc.) need to be addressed. Continuing to specialize in only one or two over
time is not likely to result in fundamental change -- community building
must be comprehensive. However, thinking comprehensively does not
mean it is wise to try to do everything at the same time at the outset.
Successful community building today often starts with an assessment of
community assets (see below) and a brief planning phase, but it does not
wait too long to move into action. It works entrepreneurially to identify
and tackle one or two high priority issues and produce some results from
those quickly (results build confidence and capacity). But as it does so, it
is simultaneously rethinking and fleshing out a broader long-term vision and
strategy, reassessing priorities and opportunities, and laying the
groundwork for other linked initiatives that will create a comprehensive
agenda over time.
(4) Asset-based. Planning community initiatives from the perspective
of "solving problems" or "meeting needs" casts a negative tone on what
should be an exciting capacity building venture. The alternative is to
identify the community's assets and develop plans that build on them. All
distressed neighborhoods do have a substantial number of assets: the skills
and entrepreneurial ideas of local residents, neighborhood businesses,
churches and other community institutions, sports and social clubs. Even
things you do not control directly (hospitals, vacant land, schools,
libraries) can become your assets if you plan and partner as needed to take
advantage of them. Moreover, the act of jointly inventorying assets is
itself a powerful community organizing device that, by evidencing
opportunities to change things, motivates collaboration and commitment to
action.
(5) Tailored to neighborhood scale and conditions. The core unit for
the new community building should be a neighborhood (usually 5,000 to 10,000
people) for two reasons. First, the natural face-to-face interactions that
support friendships and mutual trust among most residents do not work as
well at much above that scale. Second, even in the concentrated poverty
areas of inner cities, neighborhood conditions vary substantially --
planning only for larger areas is likely to miss nuances that are often
critical to effective strategies (e.g., neighborhood A has a strong and
supportive elementary school principal while neighborhood B, next door, does
not, yet the drug trade is much more open and threatening in A than B). In
preparing for community building in a city, it may well be advisable to set
up resident-driven institutions that cover larger areas (clusters of
neighborhoods), since individual neighborhoods are often too small a
planning area for some functions (e.g., economic development, health care).
But such entities need to keep the differences between their component
neighborhoods in mind as they operate and recognize that those components
need to develop their own sense of identity if social and human capital is
to be built successfully.
(6) Collaboratively linked to the broader society to strengthen community
institutions and enhance outside opportunities for residents. Community
activists of the past sometimes conveyed the impression that they wanted to
make inner-city neighborhoods self-contained and largely independent from
the pernicious society around them. The tone was dominated by conflict. An
important difference with today's community builders is that they recognize
that dream as self-defeating. They look proactively to end the devastating
isolation of inner-city neighborhoods that has emerged in recent years. They
mount initiatives to prepare their residents for work and link them to
outside jobs, while at the same time trying to stimulate new business
formation within their own boundaries. They look for opportunities to
partner with outside institutions (social service agencies, police
departments, local business and philanthropic groups, universities) in ways
that will serve their own interests and strengthen their own internal
institutions. This does not mean that there will never be conflict, but
community builders will try to use conflict as a tool of a positive agenda
rather than letting it become an end in itself. Their interaction with
outside institutions also provides an opportunity to work toward changing
the practices of those institutions so that they will become stronger
partners and more sensitive to community interests in the future.
(7) Consciously changing institutional barriers and racism. Community
building is not simply a matter of strengthening the connection between
mainstream economic, political, and social institutions and those
neighborhoods which have become isolated; it also requires all the
institutions involved to give up "business as usual." Community building by
collaboratively linking the isolated community to mainstream structures
provides the contact within which a demand for fundamental change can be
proffered by those who need it most, and the relationships and mechanisms of
collaboration within which change can be accomplished in a way that all
parties involved meet their institutional needs. As in all relationships,
the coming together is not without conflict, but community building efforts
bring the best skills of organization development and conflict resolution to
bear so that solution, rather than blame, is the focus and parties see in
their differences assets they can contribute to the common endeavor. One
strength of community building is that it focuses on concrete outcomes.
Commitment to the product draws participants beyond conventional barriers.
Since a great deal of the isolation of minority communities is the product
of racial discrimination, race matters in community building efforts. Racial
prejudice can neither be ignored nor made the centerpiece. Parties in
successful community building are willing to recognize the pervasive
influence of race, acknowledge its direct impact on particular issues under
consideration, and address that impact directly as a step in moving toward
progress on the issue. Not infrequently, the impact of race must be
discussed openly and steps taken to change behaviors and attitudes that
spring from racism. For the most part, successful community building efforts
are addressing the impact of racism as part of their problem-solving effort
in community building issues. In fact, it may be the focus on the solving of
other problems which enables an engagement on race among stakeholders who
otherwise might be reluctant to open the conversation.
(1) A national campaign to further the new community building is warranted. The broadgroup of nongovernmental and governmental institutions already involved in thefield should expand their efforts andfind new ways to collaborate so that such a campaign can be mounted. Community building practice is spreading. Increasing adherence to the themes outlined above is giving it a new maturity and effectiveness. The trends suggest that the movement is coming of age. However, it is not yet broadly enough applied to adequately meet the challenges of poor communities that it is uniquely equipped to address. It makes abundant sense to mount a nationwide campaign to further such activity.
No one should expect that community building will be an immediate "sure winner" in every poor neighborhood where it is attempted. However, given a growing list of community building success stories and, perhaps more compellingly, the virtual consensus now about the failure of past programmatic alternatives, we judge that there is no reason to wait to further enhance its practice and spread the word about it. It is also important to recognize that furthering community building, in and of itself, does not imply any major reallocation of public budgets. Community building is an alternative approach that affects how funds available for poverty alleviation are spent, regardless of the level of funding available. Indeed, because it relies less on bureaucracies and gives more emphasis to preventing bad outcomes for families and children, the case can be made that it should be a more efficient mechanism for deploying resources than those currently in force.
We judge that community building should be furthered, however, by collaboration among private and public interests, and not through the creation of any single new federal program. Direct federal programs often bring with them a level of external control likely to stifle the local creativity and initiative upon which successful community building depends. What is needed is more intensified and cohesive effort, information sharing, flexibility, and collaboration among key national entities already operating in this field.
Such groups include the National Community Building Network (NCBN), the National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED), the United Way, the Congress of National Black Churches, the Aspen Roundtable, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the Development Training Institute (DTI), the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the America Project, the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, the Chapin Hall Center, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the Enterprise Foundation, the Urban Institute, the National Association of Neighborhood Centers, the Family Resource Coalition, and the Alliance for National Renewal (several more could easily be added).
In addition, major national foundations that have made commitments to improving poor communities should also be leading partners in this effort: for example, Annie E. Casey, Ford, Kauffman, Kellog, J.D. and C.T MacArthur, Mott, Pew Charitable Trusts, Rockefeller, and Surdna. And, indeed, the federal government should also be a partner.
We offer no definite plan for how these actors should organize themselves to develop a campaign to further community building -- but only challenge them to find a way to do so. Clearly, early steps would have to include a series of convenings across groups in the spirit of partnership.
The campaign itself would have to focus on spurring and supporting action at the local level. It should help leaders in metropolitan areas across the country devise workable strategies to strengthen community building through local programs and organizations and collaborations among them. Local foundations should be called upon to convene leadership groups and support this initiative in their areas.
(2) Local governments should reorient their programs and operating style to make partnerships with community builders central to their agendas. A key objective of the campaign should be to provide information about community building to local public agencies -- county welfare and social service agencies as well as city community development, public works, and police departments. Such agencies will have a significant impact on community building whatever they do. It is quite likely that they will undermine it if they either: (a) ignore it; or (b) try to take it over. The only positive alternative is partnership -- arrangements in which local agencies allow communities to come to the table as independent (not dependent) collaborators. All collaborators should then take on clear performance obligations and hold each other accountable for results. Some localities are already moving in these directions. For example: allowing communities to set their own priorities for neighborhood service and public works investments; providing matching funds to enhance the financial feasibility of community development projects being financed largely by private sources; encouraging community groups to compete with other nonprofits to design and deliver an expanded array of social services delivered in their own neighborhoods; encouraging training and hiring of community residents (rather than outside workers) wherever possible in social service delivery and physical improvement initiatives. In many cities, however, considerable effort will be required to transform agency attitudes and practices to support this new style of operation.
(3) A high priority should be given to establishing (or strengthening) nongovernmental locally based intermediaries to support community building and community interests in all metropolitan areas. Community building cannot be expected to expand rapidly enough spontaneously. Needed is a growing cadre of committed individuals who are skilled at facilitating it -- people who can encourage community action in neighborhoods and help it in process without dominating it themselves; people the communities see as "being on their side"; people who can help represent community interests with outside entities and link them to outside resources. Who should employ these facilitators? National organizations are too far removed from the local action to guide this work sensitively. Local governments are better at playing the role of independent partner (sometimes their interests and those of the community will legitimately differ). The most promising alternative appears to be the establishment of nongovernmental locally based intermediaries. Organizations with such capabilities, in fact, already exist in a number of cities -- often linked to a local community foundation or some other entity that is seen as a nonpartisan long-term stakeholder in the city's future. The accomplishments of several are impressive. The campaign should encourage local leadership groups to strengthen those that exist and form new intermediaries where they are needed.
(4) National supporters should work to substantially strengthen training and technical assistance capacityfor community building, and build public awareness of its importance. In addition to their campaign in local areas, the national foundations and interest groups, in partnership with federal agencies, are in a position to play the pivotal role in expanding nationwide capacity to train professionals and neighborhood leaders in community building. Many reputable training institutions that focus on neighborhood improvement already exist -- the task is more one of helping to strengthen them, and furthering convergence around the new model of effective community building practice, than it is in establishing new institutions. But there are gaps: universities have done little to integrate community building themes and techniques into relevant graduate programs; the involvement of the nation's community colleges, ideal sites for local training in this field, has been negligible to date; little attention has been paid to training government officials on the benefits they could gain from partnering with community groups or how they might best approach it. The foundations and national interest groups should work with these educational institutions and encourage them to do more. They should also call upon relevant professional associations to host sessions on community building in their annual meetings and to sponsor efforts to integrate relevant community building themes in their own professional practice. Finally, they should mount a national awareness campaign to better inform policy makers and the public at large about how community building works and the potential it has to offer.
(5) Federal and state governments should play a strong role as supporting partners in this initiative. Federal and state governments should lend their support to this effort as partners, but not as controlling partners. A good model is the way national support has been given to CDCs over the past decade: local neighborhood initiatives and national nongovernmental intermediaries played the leading role, and subsequently, the federal government provided financial and informational assistance without directing the strategy. Federal and state governments can provide financial help through several vehicles: (1) by funding block grants that give localities considerable latitude in expenditure decisions, but incorporate requirements for community involvement in decision making and the provision of some minimum level of support directly to community groups (this is what HUD is doing already in the Empowerment Zone and HOME programs); (2) by being one of many contributors to a national fund supporting the advancement of community building; and (3) by offering grants for specific innovative projects directly to community groups on a competitive basis. Federal and state governments can also support training and information clearing houses, and make use of the "bully pulpit" to encourage the support of others in advancing community building as a part of the campaign proposed here.
(6) All supporters should find ways to nurture community building in individual neighborhoods, and avoid overwhelming it. Community building tends to build neighborhood capacity in increments. Supporters need to recognize that such a process will take time and that, in any neighborhood, there will be setbacks along the way. Their goal should be to help "move it up a notch at a time." They should learn how to help communities bounce back from interim failures and avoid being too "desperate for final outcomes" in the short term. They should fund it incrementally as well. In some of the best examples, funders have made their commitment to long-term support dependent on performance. Neighborhood leaders have understood that funding for the next increment of work would depend on their performance on the last. Needed is a new system of social venture capitalists who know how to provide incentives for results yet, as long as the process continues to offer promise, be willing to support mid-course corrections and have the patience to see it through.
Ironically, after a period when American social policy has with good reason given emphasis to "people based" strategies for addressing urban poverty (moving away from some of the more narrowly defined "place based" strategies of the past), community building is suggesting that, for a large portion of the nation's poor, a new kind of concentrated initiative in individual neighborhoods may be extremely important to getting people-based objectives implemented effectively. Community building is an approach that integrates the best features of both place-based and people-based strategies.
This monograph does not conclude with a recommendation of large new federal or state funding programs to support community building per se. We think there is an urgent need for governments at all levels to get on with reforms that make public, and publicly supported, systems that affect the lives of the poor work more effectively and equitably; e.g., job training and placement, child care, schools, police, health services, public assistance, social services. Many of us think those systems, when reformed, will warrant higher levels of resources, not less; but that is not an issue we try to debate here.
Our recommendation is that those institutions adjust the way they do business to support and take advantage of the community building approach. And doing that, in and of itself, is not likely to be very expensive. Indeed, the case can be made that it could lead to nontrivial savings in dollar terms and, much more importantly, in human terms. Community building depends on rebuilding a sense of hope. Our broader society, and the poor themselves, are now focused on gainful employment as the way out of poverty. If the economy does not produce the needed jobs, or if the jobs are there but they pay lower-than poverty wages and there is no back-up support, or if the support programs and changes to legal and discriminatory barriers necessary for them to access job opportunities do not emerge, or if schools and other key public institutions are not strengthened -- i.e., if there really is no hope -- community building cannot help much. If, however, there is a realistic basis for hope, the case can be made that community building can be a valuable means to both motivate and help the poor to take advantage of it.
This chapter introduces the new community building and explains the basis for increasing recognition of its importance. We begin by reviewing a few notable examples of community building practice--instances where the approach has had a significant impact. We then look back at the context of deepening poverty in our cities to try to understand why such successes have been possible. Finally, we review the growth of community-based initiatives and national support for them over the past two decades and show how practice that started out of quite disparate traditions now appears to be converging around common themes.
Recent years have evidenced a growing number of initiatives in which the residents of poor neighborhoods themselves have made significant strides toward transforming conditions in their own communities. Many of these have been among the areas most severely deva'stated by the trends in the character of urban poverty in the 1980s-places, according to the conventional wisdom, where one might least expect them. Five examples illustrate the range of their accomplishments.
The decline of industrial jobs in Indianapolis began to take its toll on the city's racially mixed Eastside community in the mid-1970s. The residents' association already established there held a series of neighborhood meetings which identified jobs and housing as the communityis highest priorities. Their response was to form a community development corporation: Eastside Community Investments, Inc. (ECI). More than 500 residents served as incorporators. An economic development plan was developed and adopted by the ECI board in 1978.
An early objective, says Tom Creasser, ECI's first president, was initially to do a few visible projects in the community to prove the CDC concept. Important here was an effort that focused on housing repair (funded under the federal Community Services Administration and Comprehensive Employment Act, as well as the City of Indianapolis and the Lilly Endowment). Teams of local residents developed skills as painters, carpenters, and general contractors. In addition to their work within the community, they found ways to use these skills to leverage resources. "We bought cheap houses in good neighborhoods from HUD," explains Creasser. "We repaired them-many didn't require much work at all-sold them at a profit, and brought those profits back to ECI to subsidize housing in our own neighborhood."
In 1984, ECI started three new projects that substantially expanded its scope and its impact. First, it established Circle Ventures, to make investments in new and small local businesses. Incorporated so it could borrow funds at very low rates from the Small Business Administration and obtaining additional support from the City and other sources, Circle Ventures has since made more than $1 million worth of venture capital loans to small firms. Second, ECI became the first CDC nationally to develop its own industrial park. The 40 acre site, well located between a railway and interstate highway near downtown, was purchased and cleared with assistance from the federal Economic Development Administration. The investment paid off: the park now houses 32 businesses that provide a sizeable number of employment opportunities for community residents. Third, ECI began what was to become a sizeable program to provide affordable new rental housing in the community. The first project entailed the purchase and redevelopment of an abandoned elementary school.
While physical improvements have been key accomplishments, ECI has also given emphasis to a wide range of social services; e.g., establishing special service programs for teen parents, special needs elderly and homeless, adults with chronic mental illness, and battered women. One of its most impressive efforts in this vein was the development of the Eastside Day Care Homes Cooperative. In the late 1980s, ECI ran a series of community forums that evidenced the lack of adequate child care as a key issue. They then mounted surveys of existing child care arrangements in the community, finding that child care was already a booming cottage industry-128 day-care providers were operating in the community, only three of whom were licensed. What was needed was not a new facility staffed by outside professionals, but more modest help to upgrade the skills and facilities of those community residents already entering the field on an informal basis. ECI's Homes Cooperative does just that. It offers a 9-week training program in home day care and assistance in home renovation, so that the community's informal providers can upgrade the quality of their service and meet state standards.
In some cases, successful initiatives are products of the spontaneous emergence of indigenous leadership. One of the most widely publicized examples occurred in Washington D.C.'s Kenilworth-Parkside Public Housing development. In 1980, in the project was in serious disrepair and its lifestyle was dominated by drugs, crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency. One of the residents, Kimi Gray (herself a divorced African-American welfare mother) brought the tenants together around a successful campaign to get more of their children to go to college. This built mutual trust and confidence enough so that as the next step the group convinced the mayor to allow them to take over the management of the project. In addition to setting up new systems for maintenance and management, again under Gray's leadership, they also used a series of techniques to reinforce personal responsibility-including mandatory classes on housekeeping, budgeting, home repair, and parenting, along with self-imposed fines and a tough policy of evicting tenants who did not play by the rules.
Tenant management began to visibly transform the project, both physically and socially, and built confidence to do more. The group established an after-school homework and tutorial program for children whose mothers worked full time; courses to help adults graduate from high school; contracts with outside doctors and a dentist to improve medical service to the project; an employment office to help residents find training and jobs; and several new tenant-owned businesses within the project (keeping both jobs and money within the community). After a long and hazardous fight (collaborating with the police), they removed the once-dominant drug trade from the area and, in 1990, bought the project outright from the local housing authority.
Results were substantial. An independent audit showed that over its first four years the Resident Management Corporation had increased rent collections by 77 percent; decreased the project vacancy rate from 18 percent to 5.4 percent; created 102 jobs for residents (10 on its staff and 92 running other businesses it had started); helped at least 132 residents get off of welfare; and saved the city at least $785,000 over what it otherwise would have spent. Over its first seven years of operation, crimes dropped from 12 to 15 per month to an average of only 2. In the first 15 years after Gray began her campaign, 700 project youth had gone on to college after high school (75 percent graduated).
In the early 1990s, the Boyd-Booth community in southwest Baltimore seemed to be disintegrating under the effects of a virulent open-air drug market. A local newspaper account stated, "Residents of Boyd-Booth heard gunshots at night and found blood on their sidewalks in the morning. Many retreated into their homes, afraid to report violence to the police, afraid drug dealers would retaliate by burning them out, or worse . . . Most people who could leave, left . .. At a community association meeting, leaders of the association realized, tragically, that they were powerless."
Shortly after the appearance of this article, however, community leaders got angrier and recognized opportunities they had not seen before. They were far from powerless. They designed and implemented a six-point program that amounted to an all-out war on the drug trade. The program was developed by partnering with a number of outside institutions (the police and other city departments, a city-wide citizens planning group, a local hospital, and the Community Law Center) and securing small grants from the Governor's office, local foundations, and other sources.
The six points were:
As a result of these activities, between 1993 and 1995 violent crime decreased by 52 percent and arrests for drugs in the community dropped by 80 percent. Analysis showed that crime also dropped significantly in surrounding neighborhoods as well; i.e., the activity in Boyd-Booth had positive spillover effects and did not simply force a move of the trade to another area nearby.
With its success in crime reduction, Boyd-Booth has since turned its attention to other issues in the neighborhood and expanded its collaboration with other organizations. With a CDC from a nearby neighborhood, it is beginning a homeownership promotion program and housing rehabilitation effort. With the city library system, it is beginning an after-school program for youth.
Mass rebellion in Newark's Central Ward in the Summer of 1967 served as a wake-up call to many institutions. One of them was the Catholic Church, which helped local leaders of the resident African-American community form the New Communities Corporation (NCC) in the following year. NCC saw its charge as "improving the quality of life of the people of Newark to reflect individual dignity and personal achievement."
NCC began with a focus on housing production. It partnered with outside institutions to raise initial capital, and planned its first project by a truly bottom-up process. A number of the intended occupants of the new project (public housing families) met one Saturday each month for over two years to learn about the process of developing housing and establish a sense of what they wanted in physical/functional terms; their conclusions became key determinants of the eventual design.
Before construction, however, they faced a battle. The estimated cost of the 120-unit project exceeded state standards for assisted housing (one state official said the design "looked too good for poor people"). NCC decided to fight for the original design even though doing so would surely delay development. In the process, they learned a great deal about how to "keep the pressure on" and, eventually, were allowed to proceed as they had planned. The project opened in 1975 and, with the skills and experience NCC had developed, it was able to compile five additional affordable housing projects (829 more units) over the next five years.
While housing development has been important, NCC has always seen its mission as more comprehensive, giving priority to employment and community social service strategies as well. A primary emphasis is hiring community residents (rather than outsiders) to staff its own functions. NCC's security force for its projects not only keeps crime rates low, but also provides 120 local jobs. Another 120 employment opportunities are provided by its domestic support program, which helps elderly residents with cooking and cleaning, and the separate full-service nursing home it developed yields an additional 200 jobs. NCC has also partnered with, and developed a facility for, Babyland Nursery, Inc., which provides infant day care for working mothers (180 jobs). NCC developed Harmony House in 1989-a transitional housing facility for previously homeless families which operates with state funding for job training and placement. Residents also receive government-funded health care, emergency food, and child care, all delivered by NCC.
In 1990, NCC was responsible for the development of a new neighborhood shopping facility, centered around a Pathmark supermarket. This project not only reduces costs for local consumers, but also serves as an intergenerational social center that brings together youth and senior citizens. The Pathmark store is one of the chain's most profitable on the East Coast. NCC retains a two-thirds share in the venture and uses its profits to support other community programs.
Since the 1960s, successive federal administrations poured funds for education and social services into New York City's South Bronx through traditional program mechanisms without much payoff. The Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP), launched in 1992 with support from the Surdna Foundation, has relied on a quite different community building approach in that area-one that is already yielding more positive results. CCRP chose to work for comprehensive human services not through traditional social work and educational institutions, but through five existing Community Development Corporations (CDCs) that, by their housing development activity over the years, had become trusted by community residents. Community organizers were employed to develop broader resident involvement in both planning and implementation. Substantive consultants were used in a manner that supported and reinforced resident decision making, rather than replacing it.
Rather than beginning with a prolonged planning period, CCRP emphasized moving quickly (to demonstrate results so as to make residents confident they could accomplish more). One early project that had substantial psychological impact entailed cleaning up, installing new lights, and mobilizing 60 neighborhood youths to paint murals in a formerly crime-ridden pedestrian tunnel that had become a cause celebre in the community.
But CCRP activities have been comprehensive and, typically, of much broader scope. The CDCs have already built new primary health facilities; developed and operated employment linkage and training initiatives; created a variety of child care programs; developed partnerships with neighborhood schools to enhance education quality; initiated neighborhood safety and crime reduction measures; and undertaken several economic development projects (including a sizeable new shopping center and a micro-enterprise loan program).
One of CCRP's most visible accomplishments has been its assistance in establishing the Mt. Hope Family Practice: a partnership between one of its constituent CDCs-the Mt. Hope Housing Company-and the Institute for Urban Family Health. While the neighborhood has had among the highest incidences of health problems in the country, health care services had always been fragmented and ineffectual. As a first step in addressing the issue, the Housing Company held intensive health education workshops in the community to build resident awareness of the importance of primary health care. The new Family Practice was then opened (in 1995), to provide a variety of relevant services (continuity of care, special services and referrals, health education and disease prevention). It employs a Spanish-speaking staff and makes special efforts to train and hire local residents for appropriate positions. The Practice accommodated 8,000 visits in 1995 and has developed the capacity to handle 16,000 visits annually thereafter.
More noteworthy perhaps is CCRP's growing emphasis on preparing residents for, and linking them to, employment opportunities. In the past CDCs have focused on job creation in small neighborhood businesses. CCRP's new Employment Service, in contrast, is concentrating even more on job training and the means of facilitating resident access to jobs outside of the community.
Given what the media has been showing them about the deepening problems of inner-city neighborhoods over the past two decades, many Americans may well be surprised that the successes described above could have occurred. But media images typically convey only a part of the story. In the paragraphs below we attempt a more complete explanation-one that starts by discussing the forces that caused a worsening of inner-city circumstances in the 1980s and then, presents evidence on the opportunity for positive directions for change.
The story has been told compellingly by William J. Wilson. His account begins by highlighting how global trends led to significant changes in the U.S. economy in the 1970's and 1980's. Manufacturing jobs, which had offered the most promising career paths for lower-skilled inner city residents, dropped significantly as a share of all employment nationwide, and the locational balance shifted notably. In metropolitan areas with the largest concentrations of poverty, manufacturing work has typically expanded in the suburbs, but either leveled off or suffered absolute declines in the cities. Given this trend, the availability of attractive job opportunities for inner-city youth without adequate education was bound to get worse.
But a second force also had a profound effect: mobility. There is a positive side to the equation-something history is likely to regard as an important achievement of American society in the last half of the 20th century. With rising incomes and the passage and enforcement of fair housing laws, large numbers of middle-income families of color were able to move out of the central cities to find better housing in the suburbs.
But that did not mean that the deeply rooted forces behind racial segregation had been overcome. Overall, America's poor have become more spatially concentrated. Research has shown, for example, that 5.6 percent of the nation's census tracts had poverty rates in excess of 40 percent in 1990, but such tracts accounted for 15.1 percent of the total population in poverty (up substantially from 11.4 percent in 1970), and almost all of them were in central cities. But this research masks an important contrast. Poor people who are white remain reasonably spread throughout our metropolitan regions. It was the poor of racial and ethnic minorities that wound up much more concentrated and isolated from the mainstream society.
The story of poor people of color left behind in our inner cities was devastating. The families that moved included most of those that had run businesses in the old neighborhoods or were otherwise regularly employed in jobs with reasonable wages. They were also those that had been the mainstays of traditional community institutions and social networks. After their departure, the young people left behind were growing up in a different world. They were deprived of the role models that healthy communities inherently rely on to guide future expectations for children. Their parents were deprived of the natural support networks that, among other things, help people access new job opportunities and the social "environment" that helps them do a better job of parenting; again, things that healthy communities take for granted.
Given this scenario, it should not be surprising that social problems accelerated, but other outside forces made matters worse. Changes in the United States economy meant job opportunities were drying up and fanning inner-city frustration. Most critical was the appearance of high-wage manufacturing jobs. Unlike previous decades, no new middle class could grow up through those jobs to replace the more affluent families who had left the neighborhood. Being trapped would have been enough, but simultaneously life-debilitating drugs were being developed that would be affordable to the poor: the crack epidemic was the result. And dramatic reductions in the prices of handguns occurred at this time as well.
Much has since been written on the affects of all of this on poor neighborhoods. Young people see no realistic hope of "making it" through America's traditional channels to success. They have little access to individual adults, groups of adults, and institutions that might show them the way. They turn to the options so readily available to them in their own environments-gangs, drugs, violence-because they are the only choices that seem accessible. Lisbeth Schorr characterizes the outcomes for many youth in these neighborhoods:
What about the systems of social service America provides to help poor children and families in these neighborhoods? There is a widely held view that they are failing in their mission at this point. Beyond the adequacy of their funding, many feel that the central problem lies in the bureaucratic fragmentation of services. A teacher may be sure that difficulties one of her students is having in school are due to problems at home rather than the capacity of the student, but reaching out to try to address those problems is outside of her job description. A specialist equipped to provide psychological counseling to a family on stress management finds out that their real problem is that they are about to be evicted and have nowhere else to go-a problem he or she is not authorized to work on.
Social service workers from various agencies keep dealing with the same families over and over as new emergencies occur in their lives. No one is assigned to look at each family's circumstances holistically and design a package of assistance that would not only address their immediate problems more sensibly, but also build the foundation to prevent the recurring emergencies. Program rules and traditions-the carving out of entrenched substantive fiefdoms-makes it diffficult if not impossible to accomplish that even if individual workers know that is what is most needed.
John Kretzmann and John McKnight go farther, suggesting that services provided by outside professionals in distressed neighborhoods can never be the whole answer-that, in fact, they can be counterproductive. As they see it, social service systems by nature tend to emphasize the negatives of inner-city life-problems and needs-rather than assets. Those systems treat neighborhood residents as clients rather than friends. Kretzmann and McKnight characterize this as a "needs-driven dead end" that only deepens attitudes of dependency and powerlessness.
. . . many lower income neighborhoods are now environments of service where behaviours are affected because residents come to believe that their well-being depends upon being a client. They begin to see themselves as people with special needs that can only be met by outsiders. They become consumers of services, with no incentives to be producers. Consumers of services focus vast amounts of creativity on the survival-motivated challenge of outwitting the "system," or on finding ways-in the informal or even illegal economy-to bypass the system entirely.
By the late 1980s, given the bleak circumstances and trends described above, it appeared that much of America had given up on the prospects of seriously ameliorating conditions in poor urban neighborhoods. The term underclass was in vogue. Some, with reinforcement from a constant barrage of media images on the horrors of inner-city life, came to believe that the dependent poor simply had a different culture and values from the rest of the nation. Even those who knew better seemed despondent. Lisbeth Schorr summarized the atmosphere this way:
Many Americans have soured on "throwing money" at human problems that seem only to get worse. They are not hard-hearted, but don't want to be soft-headed either. Even when their compassion is aroused by moving stories of desperate families or neglected children, they feel helpless and are convinced that nothing can be done. Fear of actually doing harm while trying to do good, together with the threat of unmanageable costs, have paralyzed national policy-making.''
Since that time, however, there has been increasing awareness of several facts and ways of looking at things that should shake this paralysis. Lisbeth Schorr's own research leads off in this regard. She demonstrates that knowledge about effective methods of assisting distressed families has advanced substantially in recent years and documents numerous case experiences showing how efforts that reach beyond the rigidities of the present service delivery system can pay off handsomely in turning people's lives around. She concludes that, "It is a strange and tragic paradox that confidence in our collective ability to alter the destinies of vulnerable children has hit bottom just as scientific understanding of the processes of human development and the rich evidence of success in helping such children has reached a new high."
Cutting across successful cases, she highlights several features they have in common:
The fact that more effective social service provision can make a difference is important, but it could not be expected to change much if the residents of poor communities were devoid of the basic values essential to building positive lives. There is no denying that serious problems exist. Many young people have grown up without a decent education and without developing those internal controls that cause them to care deeply about the damage they can inflict on others and themselves.
But such problems still remain in the minority in almost all poor neighborhoods. Considerable evidence has now undermined the myth that most residents of poor communities have substantially different core aspirations and values from those of mainstream America. To be sure, the environment in those neighborhoods makes it extremely difficult to raise children effectively and many are lost to positive life experiences for the reasons discussed earlier in this section. But that does not mean that the bulk of the residents of those neighborhoods do not recognize that as tragedy, do not abhor crime and drugs, or care deeply about good education for their children.
A particularly distorting misconception has been that most of the poor do not want to work. The evidence indicates that quite the reverse is true. For example, a 1989 survey of the poor in Boston found that: "Of all able-bodied poor respondents, 44 percent were working at the time they were interviewed, 38 percent said they would like to be working, 13 percent had a problem that prevented them from working (health problem, child care, other). Only about 5 percent could not give a reason or said they just did not want to work."' A national opinion poll has shown that 77 percent of welfare recipients (the same share as the general population) believe that welfare programs should require enrollment in job training and education programs; 92 percent of welfare recipients (compared with 94 percent of the general population) agree that "Welfare moms will gain self-respect by working and their children will learn the importance of work."'
Many who retell William J. Wilson's story of the effects of middle-class flight from inner-city neighborhoods emphasize the loss of role-models for the youth left behind. But clearly the loss was broader than that. Recent reflections on that loss have rekindled awareness of the importance of a healthy community to individuals of all ages. Strong communities transmit and reinforce values and standards of behaviour. Residents develop a sense of responsibility for each other-feelings of trust-and hold each other accountable. Children know that not only their own parents, but also their friends' parents and others in the neighborhood (ranging from priests to shop owners), will be aware of the way they behave and care about it-powerful incentives to stay out of trouble.
But community does not only imply sanctions-it also brings mutual support. In contrast to the social isolation that characterizes many poor neighborhoods today, residents of healthy communities can and do turn to each other for help when the going gets rough. This sort of help can range all the way from a temporary financial assistance to just a shoulder to cry on. Research by Frank Furstenberg points out that there are always a few strong-willed parents who are able to keep their kids out of trouble even in the worst neighborhoods, but for the average parent, supportive neighborhood social networks are likely to be critical to outcomes. Active community institutions and social networks offer many other benefits as well-for example, the opportunity to talk with people you trust, and take advantage of their experience and contacts, when you are looking for a job or want to take out a loan from a bank. And individuals build confidence in themselves when they work with their neighbors and achieve some mutually shared objective.
One of Lisbeth Schorr's findings was that social assistance works best when it is delivered by someone you regard as a trusted friend. She shows that committed outside professionals who design their assistance flexibly and sensitively can make a real difference to troubled families. Still, it is diffficult to imagine how such help alone could be sufficient or self-sustaining in neighborhoods where indigenous community ties and supports are nonexistent. Alternatively, in a neighborhood that has built back strong social networks and institutions, such assistance might well have more lasting value for those who need it, and it is likely that less would be required.
Can distressed neighborhoods that have lost the benefits of community build them back again on their own? It also may seem diffficult to imagine that poor families, often with little formal education, living under extraordinary stress simply to survive, would give priority to attending community association meetings, let alone devoting time to their projects. But that is what has been happening in a sizeable number of recent community building initiatives. Typically, attendance has been disappointing at first, and in some cases conflicts and mistrust have frustrated progress. But in other cases, momentum has accelerated over time. Early participants learn that supportive neighbors can ease stress, help them solve their own problems, and instill hope for the future. And then the word spreads-success, and the new attitudes it engenders, become visible to everyone and more join in.
It is of interest that these initiatives are emerging in poor neighborhoods at a time when a number of researchers have been pointing out the importance of strengthening community in America generally; i.e., for nonpoor as well as poor neighborhoods. Societies that develop do so by building capital, rather than spending all of their time and resources on immediate gratification. They build physical capital (homes and factories) and human capital (education). But James Coleman has pointed out that they also rely significantly on the development of social capital- formal and informal associations and institutions of the types we have been discussing in this section. Robert Putnam notes that, ". . . social scientists of a neo-Tocquevillean bent have unearthed a wide range of empirical evidence that the quality of public life and the performance of social institutions (and not only in America) are indeed powerfully influenced by norms and networks of civic engagement."'
And these ideas are gaining prominence on the right as well as the left. Berger and Nenhaus, for example, see both sides of the liberal-conservative debate as it has been framed in the 20th century (solely focusing on the state vs. the individual) as missing the point in that they overlook the importance of mediating structures in society-institutions that often were dominating influences on day-to-day life historically. Rather than leaving the problem of poverty solely to government or private charity, they advocate empowering poor people and communities to address their own problems via stronger mediating institutions (neighborhood organizations, churches, friendship networks, etc.).
Some have asked, of course, why not avoid all of the work of rebuilding social capital in inner-city neighborhoods and move the poor out to other neighborhoods where stronger social capital already exists? Peter Edelman explains why this is not really an alternative, even to all who hold integration as an important ultimate goal.
If you are going to give people the wherewithal to get out of the inner city, you have to take the same steps and pursue the same policies for the inner city itself that you would take if you want to create a viable community there. You have to have good schools if people are going to be employable. You have to have accessible employment so people can acquire the resources to move if they want to. You have to have good housing and effective law enforcement and decent health care, and all of the other aspects of a safe and secure neighborhood and community if you are to give people sufficient security to even think about planning to get out.
In other words, even if we had a fully effective set of people-based policies in America e.g., an income maintenance system with the proper mix of assistance and incentives applied equitably across the nation-they would not be enough. There are certain types of "infrastructure" needed to equip people to take advantage of the opportunities our society has to offer that are definitionally place-based; e.g., decent schools, and effective community-level social networks and institutions. At present, such infrastructure is not at all equitably distributed. It is particularly lacking in poor neighborhoods, especially those in large cities. For them, work to strengthen or rebuild such place-based infrastructure may well be essential before sound people-based policies can be expected to have much effect.
In the 1960's, the federal government experimented with intensive community-based improvement initiatives, notably via the Community Action Program (CAP) and the Model Cities Program. A decade later, this approach had vanished from the federal support agenda. We do not have the space to document all of the reasons here, but it is clear that national policy makers came to see that a continuation of these programs would be potentially expensive-the phrase "gilding the ghetto" entered the vocabulary-and that, as somewhat narrowly defined place-based approaches, they would be insufficient in and of themselves to seriously address the problems of poverty in America.
While the federal government has not since reentered the field so directly, the period since then has witnessed a substantial expansion of nongovernmental action in community-based initiatives. This section reviews these trends and the way they have redefined themselves over time.
Probably most prominent has been the growth of local nonprofit Community Development Corporations (CDCs). The number of CDCs nationally was negligible (almost certainly below 200) in the early- 1970's. The first systematic attempt to inventory them documented that by 1989 at least 2,000 had completed at least one project, but there are reasons to believe that even that figure represented an undercount, and it does not include many others that existed but had not yet achieved any project completions. Growth had been slow at first, but accelerated in the 1980s. Reagan administration cutbacks in social programs prompted a fundamental shift in the grant-making strategies of the nation's large philanthropic foundations toward poverty-related initiatives, and the CDCs were among the major baneficiaries of this trend."
Many CDCs started out either as the development arms of broader community revitalization initiatives, or by adopting a comprehensive anti-poverty mission themselves. Through the 1980's, however, available funding for the social service elements of their agendas was greatly diminished-sporadic at best. It was extremely hard to sustain continuity in these fields. They found, on the other hand, given the long-term financing involved, they could develop and sustain momentum with construction projects. Accordingly, as it evolved, the work of the CDCs over this period has been heavily oriented to "bricks and mortar"-local commercial investments to spur community economic development, but more dominantly, the production and rehabilitation of low-cost housing. The sector is clearly mixed in terms of capacity, but a sizeable number of CDCs have become quite sophisticated housing developers, patching together financing and support from CDBG and other federal and state sources (notably the Low Income Housing Tax Credit) as well as foundations and leveraging considerable private investment as well. In 1990, nonprofit housing developers (mostly CDCs) accounted for 13 percent of all new federally supported housing production.
The strengthening and expansion of CDCs since the late 1970's owes much to the support they have received from several national nongovernmental intermediaries. Some national intermediaries provide training and technical assistance, like the Center for Community Change and the Development Training Institute (DTI). Others focus on public policy, industry development, and networking, like the National Congress for Community Economic Development and two dozen state-level associations.
Some intermediaries provide technical assistance, and direct financial support, and help CDCs link to city-wide governmental and financial institutions. With respect to low-income housing production, the most prominent have been the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the Enterprise Foundation. LISC was initially capitalized with $10 million in 1979, half from the Ford Foundation and half from six corporations and one other foundation. It has since raised more than $2 billion from 1,100 private sources to support 1,500 CDCs in 35 cities and regions. Enterprise was founded in 1983 by James Rouse. Through 1992, it had raised $670 million in private capital for over 25,000 housing units produced by the local groups with which it is working. LISC, Enterprise, and other intermediaries have been credited with helping to transform what had been a highly fragmented array of small nonprofit housing providers into something approaching a full-fledged "production sector" on a national scale.
CDCs have been among the first to recognize that housing is not the only, or even the most vital, ingredient in the mix of efforts needed to address the multi-faceted problems of distressed neighborhoods. Some CDCs have been able to mount more comprehensive strategies (see examples earlier in this section), but most, so far, have not been able to go very far in these directions. Still, few observers would deny the importance of their contributions to date. Housing was something they could get money for, and developing it was a way to build organizational skills and capacity. New projects both met real physical needs and brought pride and hope to the community along with jobs and skill development to neighborhood residents. And the movement has created a network of vital institutional assets in many neighborhoods whose institutional fabrics have otherwise all but been obliterated.
Several other types of community improvement activities also expanded during the 1970's and 1980's. For example, a number of organizations outside of the CDC framework have also focused their work around the development and rehabilitation of affordable housing-for example, many churches and other faith-based organizations and national entities like Habitat for Humanity and the National Council of La Raza.
A notable example is the approach implemented by the federally supported Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation and the 177 local nonprofits that comprise its NeighborWorks network. The Corporation provides technical assistance and training to its local partners, as well as funding designed to leverage considerably greater investment in neighborhood revitalization. In 1995 alone, for example, $39 million in federal funding resulted in $341 million in private, public, and philanthropic funds being reinvested in distressed neighborhoods. While it has motivated a variety of nonhousing physical improvement projects as well, NeighborWorks has emphasized expanding homeownership in such communities. Three years into its recent campaign,6,530 families had purchased their own homes-for 40 percent of them homeownership proved less, or only modestly more, costly than renting.
Recent community work, however, includes other focal points besides housing development. One of the most important is community organizing, which has traditionally emphasized mobilizing community residents to form their own identities, renew their interest in public life, and fight for their rights across a broad range of issues. Prominent groups here include ACORN, a national network of community organizations that is most known for its success in challenging bank redlining and the provision of housing counseling for prospective homeowners, and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). IAP was founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky in Chicago. Nationwide, there are now 28 IAF organizations. It is particularly strong in Texas (with 10 organizations), spurred on by the successes of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, founded in 1974. COPS had organized a series of winning campaigns to secure many new capital investments and redistribute substantial shares of public assistance funding for the city's low-income neighborhoods. The Texas IAF network overall has since played a leading role in utility reform, reform of the state's public education system, and an effort to ensure higher shares of state healthcare resources for the indigent.
Half a dozen national centers of training (e.g., the National Training and Information Center (NTIC), the Midwest Academy, the Organizing Training Center, and the Center for Third World Organizers) feed a growing demand for community organizers.
Settlement Houses
Another network of continued importance is the settlement house movement. Settlement houses were initially formed just over a century ago, when the economic draw of the industrial revolution coupled with mass immigration from Europe was creating urban slums on a sizeable scale. In contrast to those administering charity, settlement house workers lived inside the slums and dealt with their residents as neighbors, rather than clients. They also championed the interests of the poor nationally, being among the leading advocates for measures ranging from child labor laws to the recognition of labor unions. One of the movement's founders, Jane Addams, counseled that the settlement "should include the family and not be confined to the children; that it should in fact stir up the adults and leading citizens of any neighborhood to action for themselves and their poorer neighbors." Over time, however, these ideas were largely pushed aside by the professionalization of social work and most of the remaining settlement houses themselves became "professionalized," but the movement nonetheless remains active in many cities.
The past decade has seen a broad movement among settlements to revive the empowerment approach of their origins, and to become engines for self-reliance for residents of their communities.
The examples cited above clearly reflect differences in objectives, process, and style. A number of academic articles in the past several years have characterized the field as if it would be permanently composed of a number of differing (i.e., competing) approaches: settlement houses, community organizing, community development, comprehensive community initiatives, etc. These are in fact the "roots" we examined independently in the seminars conducted for this project.
One conclusion of this project's seminars, however, is that the old distinctions are at least beginning to lose their meaning. There are many signs that the work of community building practitioners who may have started from different places is now beginning to reflect common themes. Certainly, differences in emphasis remain, but absolute distinctions in practice and opinion are not as hard-edged as they used to be. In addition, other professionals that work in poor neighborhoods (e.g., social service providers, the police) are beginning to adapt their practices to recognize the importance of collaborating with indigenous community organizations.
in addition, the new community building does seem to be gaining recognition at higher levels. For example:
How does the new community building differ from neighborhood-based programs implemented in the past? This section looks more closely at the themes that define and distinguish it-explaining more clearly both what it is and how it can be made to work. As noted in the introduction, individual elements of today's community building are not all new. It is the way they are packaged-the way the themes are interrelated, the nuances of more sophisticated ways of applying them, and the lessons learned about what has worked over the years-that sets it apart from earlier neighborhood-based approaches.
The clearest statement of underlying principles is that developed and adopted by the National Community Building Network (NCBN). Eight such principles are defined as follows:
Past efforts to improve urban life have too often addressed community deficits; our efforts build on local capacities and assets.
The Panel for this project endorsed these principles, but felt there was a need for more complete guidance on how today's community building needs to work in practice if it is to be effective. Accordingly, the discussion led to the articulation of a set of seven operating themes-points that are consistent with the NCBN principles, but provide a more detailed statement of content in process. As we see it, community building needs to be:
These operating themes are addressed next.
Neighborhood residents involved in community building spend most of their time jointly working on productive activities that directly address the problems and opportunities to which they give high priority, whether it is cleaning up a vacant lot, planning a housing rehabilitation project, trying to improve school quality, or mounting a citizens patrol to prevent crime. As they do these things, they are automatically building social capital-developing friendships and mutual trust, sharing and strengthening common values, learning how to work together as a team to get things accomplished, building confidence that they can achieve meaningful results, and strengthening their own institutions. This capital then spills over into the future. After they complete one set of tasks, they are both more strongly motivated and better equipped to take on yet more demanding ones in the next stage. And other benefits come qutomatically, even if indirectly. Because they are colleagues in action, for example, neighborhood residents naturally feel more of an obligation to watch out for each others' children than they have felt before.
Building social capital is most importantly a means of building human capital- strengthening the capacities of individuals and families to overcome adversities and create and take advantage of opportunities. This is, after all, the bottom line with respect to the problems of distressed neighborhoods. The ultimate aim is not for society to become better equipped to deal with teen pregnancies, crime, gangs, drugs and child maltreatment after the fact, but to prevent these problems from emerging in the first place. Both stronger social and human capital would seem essential to achieving that end-stronger families in a new environment of hope and mutual support, getting their children on the right path from the start and keeping them there. Prevention is surely the key to enormous savings in human terms, and Lisbeth Schorr cites numerous cases from her research to show that this is also true with respect to public costs. For example:
The point is that the new community builders give a greater sense of primacy to social and human capital development than did many earlier neighborhood programs. This does not mean that they have to be addressing these goals directly or talking about them explicitly all of the time. But they remain aware of their primacy and find ways to reinforce them or otherwise they will miss opportunities to achieve them as they proceed. This will affect, for example, the way they develop project initiatives. Today's community builders will more often reach out to involve a broad range of neighborhood residents in projects (using local youth to conduct surveys, mobilizing neighbors to develop the needed skills to serve as family counselors, making extra efforts to get residents involved in construction and clean-up projects) than rely only on professionals or even a limited number of experienced residents, even if doing so might seem to dampen short-term effficiency.
Federal programs of the 1960's (e.g., the Community Action Program, Model Cities) introduced a new emphasis on resident participation in improvement programs and stimulated the creation of some new entities that were actually run by the residents. But, by and large, outside professionals were still calling the shots-selecting the real priorities, controlling the budgets, taking the risks. Today's community building, in contrast, sees resident groups playing a more central role in both planning and implementation.
We think the best term to denote the current trend is community driven. This conveys neither the indirect and nondefining role implied by the term "community participation," nor the more inward-looking and absolutist role implied by the term "community controlled."
Building social capital is the primary objective and it will not be achieved unless the residents themselves are, as in most real world activities, truly in charge and accountable for results. The leaders will learn more and build capacity more effectively if they fully understand that successes will be their successes, and failures will be seen as their failures. The residents have to believe that they "own" the process and must actually play a central role in decisions if they are to move away from dependency. More important, many case experiences suggest that resident-driven initiatives have a greater chance of success on technical grounds. Residents are more aware of the realities of their own environments than outside professionals. They have a better sense of what will work and what will not work in those environments. They will see practical opportunities for solving problems that outsiders have no basis for understanding.
This does not mean that outside entities (particularly funders) will not, or should not, play an influential role. But in community building today, the community is the entrepreneur. It is not likely, or advisable, for the community group's program as a whole to be funded from only one source. The community is encouraged to diversify its sources of support and to develop clear strategies for negotiating the best deal it can with each of them. The community comes to the table in each case as an independent entity, rather than as the dependent one. There will no doubt be tensions in these relationships-there always are-but learning how to handle tensions with outside groups effectively is a key element in building community capacity and there are many community groups in the 1990's that have established this competence.
Kretzmann and McKnight urge funders of community initiatives to offer their support in a form that spurs the development of resident capacity; i.e., by requiring community associations to develop their own proposals for assistance around specific improvement initiatives, and by specifying the required contents of those proposals such that residents are encouraged to identify their assets and devise creative ways to build on them. This "Capacity Oriented Funding" approach has been used by the Tucson Community Foundation and the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis. It is an approach that gives neighborhood residents more latitude to use their own judgement in deciding what to do and how to do it, but holds them clearly accountable for producing on their commitments. The community group faces strong incentives to get its act together because it knows it risks the loss of future grants if it does not keep up its end of the bargain. Kretzmann and McKnight also recognize the need for, and encourage, partnership between community groups and government agencies, but instead of seeing these as the old idea of"citizen participation" in government programs, they advocate sensitive and facilitative government participation in citizen initiatives.
Today's community building also recognizes that community groups still need substantial help from outside professionals, but here too the terms of engagement are changing. With respect to specialists (child care professionals, family counselors, construction managers), it is more likely that the community group itself will choose the providers and do the hiring. For example, tenants associations in some public housing projects are now forming their own 501 (c)(3) corporations, and some housing authorities (e.g., Seattle, Philadelphia) are passing on available social service resources to those corporations for allocation. Within broad guidelines from the housing authority, the tenants' corporation selects the services it considers most important, contracts directly with the firms that provide those services, and is responsible for monitoring contractor compliance. Community managed health centers also, obviously, take on responsibility for hiring the health service professionals they need and for monitoring their performance.
Of course, it is important to note that while community management is not likely to eliminate the need for outside professionals, it is likely to reduce the neighborhood's reliance on them. The community association is much more likely to find ways to train neighborhood residents to handle jobs (child care, care for the elderly, entry-level health care positions, construction work, conducting surveys) that in the past have all too often gone to outsiders.
Community groups also still need help from outside professionals in overall program planning and management. The risk in this case is that seasoned professionals who know how to design and manage programs like these-from their own sense of urgency about producing results and the sheer force of their personalities and past experience-may come to dominate the process. This can happen even when the professional has been hired by the community group directly, but is more of a concern when he or she is on someone else's payroll. Addressing this critical relationship is a two-way street. On one hand, community leaders need strength and skill in using such help effectively without allowing it to erode their own sense of control. On the other hand, the professionals in this field need to adopt a new (more supportive and facilitative than directive) mode of operation, and there is considerable evidence that this is occurring.
Many of today's professionals in community building now see themselves first and foremost as facilitators rather than managers: people who know how to provide good professional advice and support, while reinforcing community leadership instead of eroding it. Facilitators can be tough and prod residents toward action, but the good ones know where to draw the line and approach it with a style that does not undermine the authority of those they are working for. Those who are playing this role in a number of prominent projects seem to have mastered it, and there is little doubt that the concept has become a strongly motivating one for the bulk of the professionals now working with communities or aspiring to do so.
Finally, perhaps the most important requisite under this theme is that the leaders of community building initiatives remain representative of neighborhood residents as a whole, and that residents retain a high rate of direct participation in the initiative's activities. To achieve these objectives, community associations often:
Not all community associations give enough emphasis to these objectives, however. Even a popularly selected community leadership group, after a time, can become removed from its constituents and begin to act in a manner that is every bit as "top down" as outside agencies have acted in the past. If this occurs, progress in social capital building that spurs human capital development-again the prime purpose-is likely to be derailed.
This project's seminar participants felt that awareness of this concern should be heightened and a series of positive steps should be considered to guard against it. Most important in the long term is for the principle of maintaining representativeness and broad participation to simply become ingrained as one of the central tenets of the field. This will require attention in the curricula of all places that train community builders (professionals and resident leaders). It seems appropriate as well for funders to impose some process requirements to ensure it is adhered to.
Inner-city neighborhoods are typically beset with multiple and interrelated challenges. Ultimately, if community building in such neighborhoods is to succeed, it must address the full range of these challenges in an interconnected way; i.e. comprehensively. New housing developments will be ravaged unless crime and gang activity is brought under control. An excellent job training program will yield little payoff if the trainees cannot accept jobs because they cannot access adequate child care or because of recurrent illness due to the lack of adequate local health services. Good social service programs will be undermined if the neighborhood's physical appearance is not clean and orderly (recent research has shown that unmaintained buildings, trash, and graffiti are surprisingly strong signals that affect behaviour). Any rigidly defined single purpose initiative (i.e., one that expects to take on only one of these issues and not move beyond it) is not really community building by today's definition.
Prudence Brown suggests that comprehensive initiatives need to deal with all of the following aspects of community life:
But it is impossible (and inadvisable) to try to address all relevant issues at the same time. Community builders now see the principle of comprehensiveness as a "state of mind"-a mental attitude on the part of all participants-which guides their agenda as it unfolds. Community leaders need to be both strategic and entrepreneurial. They may be working on only a few projects at any point, but they must be thinking constantly about how they can use their current work to catalyze action in other areas as next steps. They need to always keep the interrelationships between spheres of activity in mind so that as they work on one of them they will quickly recognize strategic opportunities to motivate new "high-payoff" initiatives in others.
The old "textbook" approach to neighborhood improvement programs normally called for a "planning phase" followed by an "implementation phase." Community building practitioners now see that approach as too rigid. They say the residents do need to develop some comprehensive vision of what they want the neighborhood to become and how to get there. It may well make sense to start with an inventory of community assets (see discussion below) and the development of a comprehensive strategy based on the results. But the initial planning should not take too long; it does not have to be "perfected" before you start. It is essential to get into some action projects quickly-even if small-to keep people motivated and show them they can accomplish things. Planning and implementation can, and ought to, proceed simultaneously and interactively throughout. Many successful leaders call their process "learn as you go." The process resembles more a spiral than a straight line. The vision will be a more useful one if it is fleshed out over time, and adapted, based on what you learn as you proceed. It does not have to be spelled out in full before you begin to act.
Practitioners say that good community building initiatives may start in many different ways, but they have a similar operating style-comprehensive, strategic, and entrepreneurial-so that they wind up looking more similar over time. In a number of cases, they may begin only because one high-priority problem-perhaps gangs or drug dealers-has galvanized the residents into action. The right thing to do at that point is to focus