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Topics: Community

South Bronx Rebuilds from the Bottom Up

Over the past few years the South Bronx has experienced an amazing turnaround. Well regarded community-based development corporations (CDCs) are acting as organizers, catalysts and implementors of strategies designed to fully recreate their neighborhoods. The Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP) is a large scale national demonstration of how to rebuild communities from the ground up, now taking place in the South Bronx. Other initiatives are discussed as well. Stories and case study plus.

Index

Story: On These Sidewalks of New York, the Sun is Shining Again
Story: South Bronx and the CCRP: Rebuilding from the Bottom Up
Case Study: Investing in Community Lessons & Implications of the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program

Contents

Case Study: Investing in Community Lessons & Implications of the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program

About this paper
CCRP in brief
Comprehensive community initiatives
Investing in community capacity
The quest for comprehensive coordination
The nuances of resident participation
Concluding thoughts
Notes
Funders

Case Study: Investing in Community:
Lessons and Implications of the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program

Mitchell Sviridoff and William Ryan
January 1996

About This Paper

On the reasonable theory that anything as ambitious as the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP) in the South Bronx must offer some rich learning opportunities, we were invited by its sponsors to consider the implications of this unique effort. What might the growing field devoted to comprehensive community problem-solving and the policy-makers and philanthropists who influence them learn from this experience?

This is not an attempt to produce in miniature an evaluation of CCRP; others are handling this complex task in the depth it requires. Moreover, though we do not approach CCRP uncritically, we confess that we already accept the notion that community development corporations, the centerpiece of CCRP's strategies, have achieved some remarkable results and hold even greater promise for many distressed neighborhoods. As for CCRP itself, after much thought and discussion with other observers, we believe that it embodies many of the principles and approaches that could enhance and accelerate the impact of CDCs, as well as inform comprehensive community initiatives not designed specifically around CDCs. While there's no value in writing about how much we are impressed by CCRP, there is value in explaining why. Doing so involves analysis of the operating styles, underlying principles, and philanthropic strategies that have shaped the project, analysis we hope will be useful for partisans and skeptics alike.

CCRP in Brief

Mid Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC) Founded in the late '70s to serve elderly residents stranded in poor housing with few services, MBSCC today serves both seniors and families with large-scale housing and human services programs. It has a staff of 235 and owns and manages 1,580 housing units. CCRP has enabled MBSCC to undertake an immunization program; new GED and ESL classes with the Board of Education; Head Start for 130 children; a catering business; youth programs, including joint efforts with neighborhood schools; the CCRP Self-Sufficiency Initiative; open-space projects; and a COMBAT neighborhood safety program in concert with the police and district attorney. In development are a primary health care facility and five retail franchises.

Mt. Hope Housing Company. MHHC was created in the mid-1980s by residents and churches organized to combat their neighborhood's decline. In just a decade, MHHC has sponsored some 1,450 units of housing, managing over 1,150 of these. It employs 60 people, including social-service personnel for case management, crisis intervention, referral and advocacy. With CCRP's support, MHHC has secured a primary health care practice and launched immunization and lead screening programs; adult education classes; a food-buying cooperative; a thrift shop; a micro-loan program with the Promesa CDC and a neighborhood credit union; youth programs, including Home Instruction for Pre-School Youngsters (HIPPY); open space projects; and a Family Resource Center that is home to the CDC's Self-Sufficiency Program.

Phipps Community Development Corporation - West Farms. Phipps Houses, a city wide developer of low- and middle-income housing, began work in the West Farms neighborhood 24 years ago. Today it owns and manages 1,850 units in the South Bronx. Phipps launched its CDC in the late 1980s to provide social services for the area. With CCRP assistance, Phipps has mounted a number of new initiatives, including: a Beacon Program in a neighborhood school that serves over 1,100 residents with recreation, education and social services; a new job training program run by the San Jose-based Center for Employment Training; an immunization program; a primary health care practice with Montefiore Hospital; a Youth Fair Chance program for 300 in-school and out-of-school youth as well as HIPPY and Head Start programs; and a large open-space project.

Promesa, Inc., a drug treatment agency founded in 1977, transformed itself into a CDC in the early l990s, beginning with the sponsorship of 196 units of affordable housing. It has since developed a 108-bed residence for AIDS victims and opened a new youth treatment facility in the same neighborhood. Promesa, which employs 161 people, has used CCRP support to launch: youth and neighborhood councils; a new federally-funded youth program; joint CDC-school initiatives; a day care center; open-space projects; employment training with the hospitality industry to prepare residents for hotel jobs; a micro-loan program; COMBAT, the neighborhood safety program involving the police and district attorney; adult education classes with the Board of Education; and CCRP's Self-Sufficiency Initiative.

CCRP proposed to help these CDCs "create and implement integrated and holistic revitalization strategies...that recognize the interrelationships in housing, education, employment, child care, health and human services, recreation and neighborhood security."

Comprehensive Community Initiatives CCRP is one of many new initiatives launched in recent years to tackle these inter-related problems. A 1995 survey counts 49 of them. [2] There are some 30 sponsors of comprehensive initiatives in the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive Initiatives for Children and Families. Efforts like The Atlanta Project and The Enterprise Foundation's Sandtown-Winchester project in Baltimore have been widely publicized. In 1993, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation launched a new community-building program in 11 cities. More recently, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has begun a multi-city demonstration program with similar goals.

Despite the variety of players in the field, their understanding of the problems of troubled families and distressed communities is strikingly consistent. Most sponsors of comprehensive initiatives argue that the present array of social programs is highly "fragmented"; that "holistic approaches" are needed to "integrate" social service delivery systems so they will better respond to the "inter-related" problems of people living in poverty; that distressed communities need increased "capacity'' for problem-solving; and that residents need new tools to achieve "self-sufficiency." Hence their "comprehensive" nature.

This consensus notwithstanding, the sponsors of these comprehensive initiatives generally arrive at this new promised land by way of two quite different routes: one via human services and the other via community development. To review these two routes no longer means returning to the rivalry between two orthodox schools of social strategists: the people strategists, who argue for programs tailored to individual needs (e.g., education, job training, social services) versus place strategists, who argue for programs aimed at improving living and economic conditions within a given community (e.g., housing stock, economic development, job creation). As they have moved toward comprehensive community strategies, both schools have transcended that debate. Both have developed new analyses of their roles.

On the one hand, many human service professionals (the "people" strategists) have concluded that a series of specialized programs aimed at the various needs of individuals is not working well. They are looking to link them, rationalize them, and make them more responsive to families through new oversight and planning structures. They are also seeking new ways to engage residents in the design and operation of the programs in an effort to strengthen communities' problem-solving capacity. They are attempting to reform service delivery systems.

On the other hand, community development practitioners have meanwhile determined that, despite their encouraging successes in physical development, they, too, need a new approach. They need to pay more attention to the goals of public safety, family self-sufficiency, and overall neighborhood stability more directly if their improved housing stock is to endure. They are setting more comprehensive goals.

Though human service professionals and community development practitioners now find themselves on common ground, they come to it with very different histories. As they establish new community initiatives, they are assessing which of the conventions, tools, and values they carry will serve their new mission. What best supports comprehensive community strategies? What new approaches are needed? How can the wares of human service and community development be fitted together to create new results?

We propose to examine CCRP's blend of human service and community development strategies, particularly in terms of three questions that are central to any comprehensive revitalization strategy:

• How does an initiative invest in community capacity? The human service approach focuses on developing and coordinating programs. The community development approach has favored developing strong community-based organizations. In combining the two, CCRP uses a special investment strategy that builds strong organizations and links them with the most promising programs and expertise available.
  
• How does an initiative make the concepts of "coordination " and "comprehensiveness " operational? The human service tendency is to build a new structure for the centralized coordination of multiple service-providers. The community development approach focuses more on creating resources—housing, jobs, businesses, parks, etc. CCRP combines both approaches, but it is its support of entrepreneurial collaboration among a set of strong, self-directed organizations that gives it special advantage.
  
• What role should residents play in the revitalization of their neighborhoods? The human service tendency has been to work with residents as clients/consumers or as advisors to new coordinated service systems that in turn view residents as clients or consumers. The community development tradition favors the civic engagement of residents in managing and developing a range of community institutions. CCRP is fundamentally rooted in this approach, though it has woven into its operations the client-service provider model as well.

Investing in Community Capacity

Balancing Program Capacity and Organizational Capacity

Support for program capacity is driven first by concerns about the efficacy of a given social intervention and the capacity of an organization to manage or deliver it. The organization figures almost as the means for delivering the program. Support for organizational capacity is concerned with the capacity of an organization to succeed, as an organization, and to a lesser extent with the efficacy of any particular program that the organization might deliver. Organizational capacity is achieved through non-program pursuits like strategic planning, professional development, organizational development, management and leadership, and so on.

One is useless without the other, of course, but a strong organization with the resources to determine how best to meet its mission is in a different position from one that is struggling by with only the thin glue of overhead to hold its programs together. It takes organizational capacity not just to deliver a program, but to decide which programs to seek out and implement. A healthy organization is in a position to learn and plan so it can pursue different means of delivering on its mission.

The nonprofit sector lives with this tension between program and organizational capacity daily. The dichotomy makes its most visible appearance with the publishing of expenditure pie charts in annual reports. Here a thin expenditure wedge for "administration and fundraising" is shorthand for "good organization." Most of the money, the pie chart implies, should be in program delivery. The conundrum for nonprofit managers, of course, is that a series of programs, with only a thin layer of management funded by general operating support, might not add up to more than the sum of its parts. It often leaves only a few crumbs for planning, learning, connecting, adapting, organizational development and fundraising.

Even funders sympathetic to the organizational needs of their grantees are likely to hesitate before simply granting large unrestricted sums. They have a fiduciary responsibility of their own and are right to worry about surrendering all of the parameters that program outcomes typically provide. It's this tension—between the need to build capacity and the problems of simply granting blank checks—that CCRP overcomes with its investment strategies. These strategies closely resemble the practice of venture capital in the world of business.

CCRP as Venture Capital for Community Building The term venture capital is perhaps too loosely applied in nonprofit circles. [3] For instance, a foundation investing in an entrepreneur, as opposed to an institution, calls itself a venture-capital funder. Or a funder of start-up organizations will dub itself a venture capitalist, without considering what makes venture capital truly distinctive. The critical characteristic of venture capital is that it comes with a commitment to work in partnership with the funded organization on a growth or expansion plan. It is not just money but money backed up by an ongoing relationship to strengthen the organizational capacity needed to get the job done. [4] According to the venture capital lore, in fact, management capacity is as important as product appeal. As the venture capital saying goes, "A-quality management with a C-quality product is always better than C-quality management with an A-quality product."

Here is where CCRP got out of the program capacity box at the outset. Instead of issuing an RFP to recruit participants, it chose the initial participating CDCs based on its own observations about their organizational interests and readiness. In contrast, a funder's RFP that lays out explicit criteria is quite transparent: the focus is on the ability of applicants to do the funder's bidding, not on the compatibility of funder and applicant to become partners in building an organization that can deliver on its own mission. Underlying the five CDCs CCRP works with are prospects for A-quality management to put new capacities at the service of their neighborhoods.

Searching out this A-quality management is not creaming—or hunting down a sure winner to demonstrate the success or impact of a program all the more easily. To the contrary, talent is a prerequisite for the venture capitalist and CCRP alike precisely because their respective ventures are going to create extraordinary new demands. The new demands are often unanticipated, the direct result of expansion into untested areas. The planning, strategy making, launching of new programs, networking and collaboration that CDCs must engage in to implement the broader vision at the heart of CCRP all require greater effort and risk-tolerance. When a funder's aim is more organizational capacity, success is a continuum; you start with the strong and make them stronger. Creaming loses its meaning.

Nor is the idea of funders' partnering with the organization just a more glamorous packaging of"technical assistance," which hardly describes the CCRP approach. Technical assistance belongs mostly in the program-capacity tool box. The technical assistant is often concerned with enforcing fidelity to a program model, not enhancing the capacity of the organization to choose or build its own programs. If you run a brand-name job training program, for instance, your technical assistant helps you make it work, in part because the funder or program innovator wants to ensure that its good program doesn't get botched in the hands of inadequate implementers. CCRP is not trying to get CDCs to effectively deliver the programs CCRP believes in or has created. It is trying to help CDCs find or develop programs that serve their own needs and agendas.

Consequently, CCRP is not built on program-centered technical assistance but on organization-centered capacity-building. For example, it now supports 19 full- and part-time CDC staff budgeted at an annual cost of nearly $725,000. Both these staff and additional investment strengthen core capacities. For example:

• a CCRP program manager at each CDC in charge of the planning and implementation that helps it develop and integrate new resources for the community;
  
• an outreach worker at each CDC to assist in making and strengthening connections with and among residents and other community-based organizations;
  
• over $200,000 in new computer software, hardware, installation and training for new case-work, job-matching and management information systems; and
  
• the services of an urban planning firm for support in developing and realizing quality-of-life physical plans for each neighborhood at a cost of $225,000.

It's within this context—of highly responsive investment that expands staff capacity to facilitate important economic and human development—that CCRP provides program-focused technical assistance. For example, the CDCs have all used CCRP's contacts, funds and on-site professionals to establish new management information systems; to install a new job training and placement data base customized for CDCs to use among their residents; and to offer their residents Health Realization, a mental health education program that helps people strengthen their personal problem-solving capacities. In none of these cases does the tail wag the dog: CCRP's loyalty is not with the new technology products or with the mental health program but with the CDCs' capacity to undertake them and integrate them into their own efforts. Together they determine what looks useful. If an appealing program model has to be adapted to make it more effective for local needs, CCRP pays for the changes.

This attention to organizational capacity is common in the community development field. The mission of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, The Enterprise Foundation and the National Community Development Initiative explicitly includes strengthening the capacity of CDCs to tackle local problems. Refinements of that basic strategy continue to evolve. A number of "community development collaboratives" have emerged in recent years. Like CCRP, they link CDCs with outside expertise, raise funds, and expand local capacity. Most of them, however, are focused on housing production capacity. LISC's Community Building Initiative, now in operation in 11 cities, has goals similar to CCRP's, though it tends to work on a smaller scale with a narrower range of issues.

Before totally exhausting the venture capital analogy, we should note the relationship of CCRP as intermediary to its own funders. Very much like co-investors in a venture capital fund, they have pooled their money to back a new initiative. Surdna, with its initial grant of $3 million, originated the fund. As executive director Edward Skloot worked closely with CCRP's director to refine the concept and operating plan, it attracted other funders, who now total 16 and have added nearly $5 million to Surdna's initial three. They are not atomistic funders of CCRP, who might encounter their counterparts only in the thank-you section of their grantee's annual report. The funders periodically review the directions and progress of CCRP, and conduct frequent site visits, which give them an opportunity to learn from and inform the new "industry" they're backing.

Finally, there's no missing the role of CCRP's director, Anita Miller. Her impact on the program underscores again its distinctive investment style. She was critical from the outset; she was the A-quality management that the initial funders banked on even before the CCRP strategy was fully developed. In relation to the CDCs, her role is neither that of the program officer nor that of the bank officer (although she has been both). She invests her own considerable experience along with CCRP's funds. (She was previously involved with community-based organizations in the South Bronx as a program officer at the Ford Foundation and later as South Bronx program officer for LISC.) True to the venture capital mode, she is also a counselor, sounding board, devil's advocate, co-strategist, and link to government and other influential leaders. This activist role has the potential to create great value for an organization. As one entrepreneur commented in a recent venture capital survey, perhaps overstating the case, "It's more important whose money you get than how much you get. . ." [5]

This idea—that whose money matters, or this image of a nonprofit entrepreneur as the cornerstone of a successful social initiative—grates against the program-centered sensibilities of a good part of the sector. "It's her, not the program," we suspect, "and therefore the demonstration is idiosyncratic." As one observer, an admirer of CCRP in fact, asked us, "Is it the song or the singer?' We answer, of course, that it's both, as it must be: it takes a strategy and its execution to produce a result.

The Quest for Comprehensive Coordination

Creating Comprehensive Service Systems or Comprehensive Resources?

Coordination is essentially vertical. Some one or some group acts as the agent of rational planning. Control resides in the coordinator. Others are asked (or forced) to submit to their judgments. Even when a central coordinating body looks very bottoms-up, with lots of empowered residents on it, in relation to the groups it coordinates, it is essentially top down. It supplies the agenda and the rationale for joint action.

All of this is done on behalf of a client or community presumably unable to handle the job of getting access to and using specialized services. For example, as patients we typically lack the expertise to coordinate anything beyond the most straightforward medical interventions. In the case of a family in crisis, compounded by poverty, the job of threading together multiple services is only an added burden for them. It is to ease such burdens that services are coordinated on behalf of clients.

In sum, what we have in coordination is a management tool. And this management tool is too narrow a foundation for a community revitalization strategy. If a good deal of what poor people living in distressed communities need is access to non-clinical services or resources, new or existing, then is fiagme~on even a pressing problem for them? Certainly, outside distressed communities, fragmentation of resources hardly figures as a problem. Residents in most functional neighborhoods are not apt to experience the lack of explicit connection among public whools, parks, block associations, heatth clinics, cultural offerings, or shops as 'fragmentaffon." Is the problem of fragmentation per se really any different for residents of distressed communities?

What is more likely to be relevant to them, once our ambitions move beyond specialized services, is an adequate supply of high-quality, accessible services and resources. It is networking and collaboration, not coordination, that contributes best to the expansion of this resource base. Unlike coordination, these are not top-down, not the exclusive province of professionals, and not aimed at passive consumers.

Networking is a self-directed search for potential partners. The goal is collaboration: to find a partner with compatible goals but different resources so the two together can add something of value. So the library and public housing council teaming up to run a book club in the housing development; the CDC partnering with a job-trainer to connect unemployed residents to work opportunities; the youth recreation program allying with a neighborhood association to reclaim and program a local park—all are the types of collaboration that neighborhood-based organizations might launch through a networking process.

Organizations focused on building a bigger base of neighborhood resources can often leave it to residents to coordinate and integrate these resources on their own. They focus on increasing the supply, and residents manage their own use according to their own needs. Our personal problems and needs are inter-related, in our own lives, but all the organizations meeting them need not be linked. If the supply is there, we get what we need, without any central planning intelligence to deliver it as a package.

CCRP's Networking and Collaboration on the Ground At its core, CCRP is organized around the goal of developing an adequate supply of high-quality, accessible resources. Dedication to this goal has three important operational consequences. First, as we have suggested, CCRP values networking over coordination. Second, it supports planning by CDC-led collaboratives and residents, but only as a means to implementation, not as an end or a value in in its own right. Third, it includes within this networking framework case-management integration strategies for the human services

Since CCRP is dedicated first to increasing the supply of community resources, it focuses on discrete initiatives. Things like the Phipps CDC's Beacon School; a Head Start program for 130 children (school- and home-based, with a job-counseling component for parents) and a commercial catering business, both run by the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council; HIPPY and employment readiness workshops, run by Mount Hope Housing Company; and Promesa's joint venture with the hospitality industry to train hotel workers—are all significant new resources for the community. But it's the very sight of all these separate programs, flourishing though they may be, that excites anxiety about fragmentation. A tour of CCRP's investment area, for example, would not feature residents engaged in planning sessions, evidence of master plans, or blueprints for new service structures. A visitor sees instead an expanded supply of resources, up and running.

Developing these new resources does require planning, though, and CCRP invests in it accordingly. CCRP's planning approach starts with its image of the five CDCs as "lead agencies" for their neighborhoods. Each CDC used CCRP resources to collaborate with their communities in formulating strategic action plans that lay out a series of very specific objectives and identifies the capacities and resources needed to implement them. At first, CCRP seems almost like a perversion of the great urban revitalization dictum "Make no small plans." It insists on making many small plans. But by bringing them to fruition, it reveals a large neighborhood vision.

CCRP rejects the idea of a coordinated, comprehensive moment—when multiple objectives, organizations and actions are all brought into alignment—but embraces the goal of comprehensive outcomes. Working toward a comprehensive movent requires an enormous planning effort. Working toward comprehensive outcomes, on the other hand, requires planning and goal-setting, but more than these it requires planning with an emphasis on implementation. Head Start Programs, HIPPY, a micro loan program or development of a shopping center are all part of a comprehensive effort in the sense that they contribute to the community's resource base. What they have in common is their origins in and relevance to community needs and aspirations, not conformance to a plan for coordinated action.

CCRP's tendency to think incrementally, to find workable points of entry into big problems, is common in community development. CDCs live by spotting and exploiting pockets of opportunity, with little regard for a master plan. This "planning while doing," as CCRP describes it, runs deep in other currents of social policy as well. The Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Program was no less ambitious than any of today's comprehensive initiatives. The program's creator, Paul Ylvisaker, likened their action plan to jujitsu, "the art of applying pressure selectively."

Supported by CCRP, the CDCs have engaged in networking across the city to find resources for expanding the supply and quality of resources for the community. It has introduced them to resources never before involved in their community, or strengthened and expanded the ties of organizations which previously had only had a toe-hold:

• Federation for Employment Guidance Services (FEGS), a 62 year-old citywide agency is helping the CDCs mount a Self-Sufficiency Initiative designed to help residents manage the many challenges related to finding and keeping work. CCRP grants pay for a full-time "dedicated" staff person, who has ongoing support from other-FEGS personnel.
  
• Citizens Committee for New York City receives CCRP support to provide the CDCs and their residents with the technical assistance they need to confront neighborhood safety problems. A Citizens Committee consultant who works with the CDCs three days per week is backed up by agency staff.
  
• The Trust for Public Land helps the CDCs implement the open-space recomendations included in their physical plans. CCRP funds the Trust to provide the CDCs with the services of two staff working part-time for CCRP.
  
• The Urban Resources Partnaship (URP), a new program of the US Department of Agriculture, worked with CCRP to identify suitable open-space projects for $600,000 in grants along with technical assistance from the six federal agencies that participate in URP. Three CDC sites are now underway.

These are in addition to the resources and funds aimed at strengthening their capacity to manage these new partnerships—things like management information systems, CCRP program managers, and outreach staff at each CDC. The CDCs use this infrastructure, and their new connections, to help them reach their goals of comprehensive outcomes.

What coordination promises a pay-off, CCRP helps CDCs pursue it. All of the CDCs provide a range of social services under the management of case workers, drawing on their own services and those of other agencies in the neighborhood. To facilitate the integration of these services better, CCRP has funded a new user-friendly automated case management and client tracking system that allows human service staff to work with their clients more effectively. The system also allows a case-worker to access an enormous database with information on day care, adult education, and job training opportunities. This professional coordination is confined, though, to the delivery of human services while enhancing their capacity to deliver employment-focused case management.

The central driving principle of CCRP remains development-oriented: create new resources, collaborating with existing resources where it will pay off.

The Nuances of Resident Participation

Perhaps nothing says more about the underlying values of a comprehensive initiative than its relationship to community residents. While residents are obviously the intended beneficiary and raison d'etre of any initiative, they play different roles from one initiative to the next, or even different roles within a single initiative. They typically figure either as clients, political activists, policy makers, or engaged citizens—roles we describe below. CCRP engages residents in all these modes, but with a clear and distinctive preference for the role of the engaged citizen.

Resident as client. Most ofthe human service profession is built on the client-service provider relationship, a model now under conspicuous attack. John McKnight, a student of social work and community building, articulates a minority view among social-work professionals. He criticizes their deficit-centered treatment, which relies on professionals to remedy one or another personal malady, because it stifles collective, resident-led action. Treatment threatens to turn us into a "nation of clients." [6] Or as therapist James Hillman observes of the self-help movements emanating from the therapeutic professions, something is amiss when people go out on Tuesday because they are fat and on Wednesday because their parents abused them. Communities would fare better, he argues, if people went out to join in political, civic and social events. [7]

Resident as empowered political activist. Most practitioners would agree that treatment cannot succeed as the centerpiece of a revitalization strategy. In reaching beyond treatment, many turn directly to its polar opposite—empowennent strategies. These typically seek to redress social and economic injustice by organizing residents as a political force. Empowerment strategies have been uniquely effective in generating important policy victories, like passage of the Community Reinvestment Act, which has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to the inner city. But since not every need of a neighborhood is best understood as a power imbalance, empowerment as political activists, like treatment, cannot work alone as a platform for community revitalization.

Resident as policy maker. Another version of empowerment, popular in a number of comprehensive initiatives, regards residents as policy makers. They are attached as advisors or planners, usually on a board or council, to the comprehensive initiative. They may serve alongside service providers and leaders of community-based organizations, all of whom are called on to represent the neighborhood in the planning and governance of the initiatives.

For all its appeal and logic, the resident as policy maker is clearly limited. First, there is the issue of numbers. Only a small fraction of a community's residents will have the time or inclination to participate in such a forum. (For the work of an advisory council to have any impact, the size of the group must necessarily be limited anyway.) Just as no one would regard the presence of a 30-member City Council as evidence of an engaged citizenry—without looking at voter turn-out and other evidence of widespread civic activity—it is a mistake to fixate on the formal governance structures of a revitalization effort as the platform for revitalization. They are at best the tip of the iceberg.

Moreover, depending on their planning and policy decidoas, the3r can a~alty neglect widespreact resident involvement in the work of revitalization. If they are blind to the need to engage residents in the many orgaruzations that make up the reat civic life of the community, or if they focus mostly on improving tbe delivery and consumption of human services, they have missed the essence of revitalization.

Resident as engaged citizen. We call this last mode of resident involvement civic engagement. It is the process of creating connections between residents and the local institutions that shape the life of their community. Richard Taub, a University of Chicago researcher on community development, articulates the distinction between this path, which he calls "efficacy," and the politically oriented empowerment path:

Instead of looking at the question of empowerment—in the sense of having a political impact on large, impersonal forces—it might make more sense to think about efficacy, the capacity of individuals to believe that they can change the course of their own lives by their own efforts. . . . [It's a mistake to] think of empowerment as only or primarily a political phenomenon. Helping to create the conditions that make it possible for people to get control over their own lives is also empowerment." [8]

This is the work without which revitalization cannot succeed.

New York City's education reform efforts illustrate nicely the difference between political empowerment and citizen engagement. Almost 30 years ago, reformers saw that resident engagement was critical to a responsive school system. But their reforms played out as political empowerment alone: local, elected community school boards were created to increase parent and community involvement. Instead, they have ended up generating elections with single-digit voter turnouts and a sizable record of political corruption and educational failure. It was only later that the reform pendulum swung from political empowerment to resident engagement. School-centered education reforms, which give parents an active role in their local schools, are now the lead players in the education reform repertoire.

This is the type of engagement that is the sine qua non of community revitalization. It is widespread resident involvement that is best suited to the job of stabilizing or turning a community around and sustaining the progress. The more residents engage, the more they build up networks, contacts, trust and standards — all ingredients essential to a community's problem-solving capacity. Political scientist Robert Putnam has lent new momentum to this analysis by recasting these resident connections in terms of "social capital." He argues that social capital is a resource that grows from use: the more collective problem-solving a community does, the better it becomes at collective problem-solving. [9] If these social assets seem like Pollyanna confections, consider the most distressed public housing projects of our cities, where their absence is palpable and decisive. As federal policies directed increasing numbers of very poor, often troubled residents to public housing projects, many of which were designed and sited in ways that isolated residents from each other and the wider community, social networks became thinner. Large concentrations of people under stress provided little in the way of community-building resources. [10] In a common CDC scenario, on the other hand, a community-based organization not only develops housing but does it in a way that draws on and creates resident engagement building a network of committed individuals capable of reaching beyond housing concerns to safety, recreation, and other community problems.

The CCRP Pyramid of Resident Engagement CCRP reflects a fundamental commitment to widespread citizen engagement while leaving to the CDCs decisions about the appropriateness of political empowerment strategies. If we modeled this approach in three dimensions, it would be a pyramid.

At the tip would be treatment, which constitutes an important but narrow band of CCRP's work. In fact, the South Bronx CDCs participating in CCRP have more experience in social work and case management than the typical CDC. For example, Mid Bronx Senior Citizens Council provides social services to the elderly, both in their homes and at CDC facilities; they also work to prevent homelessness and work with formerly homeless who occupy their housing. To enhance basic social work, CCRP has added FACTORS. This computer system helps social workers manage their cases more effectively, allowing them to measure outcomes they achieve and to refer residents to other service providers.

These interests notwithstanding, the CDC culture in general has historically tended to view social work as a "soft" service of uncertain value, catering too much to the weaknesses of individuals and not enough on building their strengths. This bias reveals itself in the CDCs' embrace of Health Realization, the one new program closest to treatment that the CDCs have adopted through CCRP. While it focuses on the individual and offers a specific treatment, the treatment itself consists in large part of helping people overcome their tendency to think of themselves as victims, with the specific goal of enabling them to contribute to community-building. In its aspiration to move them from patient to citizen, it is highly compatible with the prevailing CDC ethos.

Toward the middle of the pyramid would be empowerment tactics. CCRP has supported a number of processes to encourage planning and consensus-building that allow those who live and work in their neighborhoods to articulate their own vision for its future. For example, with the help of a CCRP-funded professional planning firm, each CDC has prepared a quality-of-life physical plan by organizing extensive, grass-roots planning processes to solicit residents' views and ideas. The plans (which recently won the American Planning Association's Presidential Award) have helped local residents frame their agenda effectively. They are already influencing the allocation of resources and development within the neighborhoods as the CDCs, government agencies, and other partners begin focusing on implementation.

At the base of the pyramid is civic engagement—the connection of people to each other and to local institutions, not as clients or beneficiaries but as resources. For example, public safety strategies that CCRP has helped the CDCs to implement rely not just on increasing police responsiveness but on mobilizing residents to create safe corridors for school children. Residents create their own sense of order to support police interventions and hold their local police precincts accountable in the process. HIPPY, the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters, does not merely offer enrichment for children but offers their parents, mostly mothers, new habits and tools to support a richer learning environment in the home. Parents become a resource between sessions. At sessions, the mothers learn together in an informal setting with food and socializing. The same approach extends to the planting and maintaining of community gardens and the formation of youth groups and neighborhood councils. Throughout, residents are not consumers but contributors, engaging not alone but as groups of stake holders in their neighborhoods.

Even though this widespread base of resident engagement is probably far more valuable than the involvement of a small number of residents advising a foundation-backed initiative directly, the prevalent preoccupation within the comprehensive reform field remains with formal governance. In contrast, CCRP has invested little in formal governance structures to direct its overall programs. There is no resident advisory council or citizens' panel to monitor, steer or hold accountable the initiative. Instead, it focuses on strengthening CDCs as the feed agencies of their own neighborhoods, where local residents will hold them accountable.

CCRP concludes, in sum, that resident policymakers are no substitute for the engaged citizens working across the many associations and institutions where most contact with the community occurs and where the burden of effective revitalization must rest. CCRP does combine the human service field's appreciation for the role of accessible treatment with the organizing field's appreciation for mobilized citizens to make decisions for the community, but is distinctive for its primary emphasis on vigorous resident engagement throughout the community. This is a high-octane blend for a long-distance journey.

Concluding Thoughts

First, innovative programs in themselves will not turn around distressed neighborhoods. The centerpiece for revitalization must be strong local organizations—with enough staying power, planning, learning, and management capacity to run programs well and, indeed, to choose programs wisely in the first place. This dedication to organizational capacity, in turn, implies a new investment strategy, where the funder has to work in close partnership with the organizations it supports.

Second, coordination and planning won't revitalize distressed communities without equal measures of networking and implementation. What seems obvious—do, don't just plan—is not easy to accomplish. More time is spent at the drawing board in many communities than in delivering on the visions developed there. CCRP's role in helping local organizations network speaks again to its respect for organizational capacity and autonomy: the CDCs seek out partners and develop projects and programs according to their own needs. The action is local and entrepreneurial.

Third, democracy won't revitalize distressed communities — unless it's built on a strong foundation of resident engagement. The challenge is not to engage a few policy-inclined residents or leaders, no matter how effective they are, in deliberative or political processes. The special challenge of revitalization is to strengthen and sustain an array of community associations and institutions.

Finally, its status as a national demonstration program notwithstanding, CCRP may be most promising for having designed its initiative from the start around the particular needs and assets of the CDCs it works with. It grows out of an analysis of ground-level conditions, and works from there to a hypothesis about how to build a comprehensive program on that base.

It would therefore be a mistake to take CCRP as a prescriptive program. For the field at large, CCRP is most important for the guiding principles and operational style that have emerged from its experience. 4/3/96

Notes

2. "Compendium of Comprehensive, Community-Based Initiatives," by Cheryl D. Hayes, Elise Lipoff, and Anna Danegger, for the Finance Project, Washington D.C.

3. Our discussion of venture capital is informed in large part by discussions with T. Meriwether Jones of the Aspen Institute, who is preparing a paper on philanthropy and venture capital for the Going to Scale Project (The Philanthropic Initiative, Boston, MA).

4. For those who find this image of venture capitalists as nurturing partners overly romantic, research by William Bygrave and Jeffry Timmons, in Venture Capital at the Crossroads (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1992), is an eye-opener. Their survey of 120 entrepreneurs and venture capitalists shows the entrepreneurs rate non-monetary "value-added" services even higher than the venture capitalists who rendered the services. Active partnership that goes far beyond money seems to be the norm.

5. William D. Bygrave and Jeffry A. Timmons, Venture Capital at the Crossroads (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992): 208.

6. John McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Countefeits (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

7. Sy Safransky, "The Rainmaker Fantasy," Networker, September/October 1991, pp. 61-64.

8. Richard Taub, Nuace and Meaning in Community Development: Finding Community and Development (New York: Community Development Research Center, New School for Social Research, 1990).

9. Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone," Joumal of Democracy, 6 (January 1995): 65-78.

10. See, for example, Lewis H. Spence, "Rethinking the Social Role of Public Housing," Housing Policy Debate, Volume 4, Issue 3 (Washington: Fannie Mae, 1993): 355-368.

Funders Bankers Trust Company Foundation
Chase Manhattan Bank
Chemical Bank
Citibank N.A.
James C. Penney Foundation
Merck Family Fund
Surdna Foundation
The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Rockefeller Foundation
The New York Community Trust
The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
The Engelberg Foundation
The Annie E. Casey Foundation
The Clark Foundation
Uris Brothers Foundation
Anonymous Donor

Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program
330 Madison Avenue, 30th Floor
New York, New York 10017-5001
Tel:(212) 557-2929 Fax:(212) 557-3013

Index

Story: On These Sidewalks of New York, the Sun is Shining Again
Story: South Bronx and the CCRP: Rebuilding from the Bottom Up
Case Study: Investing in Community Lessons & Implications of the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program

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