 | Topics: Community
Community Building
Coming of Age 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. Index Preface
Executive Summary
Chpt 1: Context & Convergence
Chpt 2: Themes of the New Community Building
Chpt 3: Supporting Broader Applications of Effective Community Building
Appendix, Notes Contents Preface
Executive Summary
Chpt 1: Context & Convergence Preface 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. Executive Summary 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. Chapter One: Context & Convergence 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: - In 1976, residents of a low-income Indianapolis community formed their own Development Corporation which has since trained a team of local residents in housing repair and rehabilitation that now earns fees from work in high-income areas to help support its ongoing refurbishment of housing in the community; converted an abandoned school into a successful rental project with affordable apartments; developed its own industrial park (which now houses 32 businesses); established a fund which has made more than $1 million worth of venture capital loans to small firms in the community; established a day care cooperative and trained residents to provide affordable child care to neighbors who needed it; and established special service programs for teen parents, special-needs elderly and homeless, adults with chronic mental illness, and battered women.
- The tenants association of a Washington, D.C., public housing project took over the management of the project and set up a number of its own social service, educational, and economic development initiatives. Over its first four years of control, it increased rent collections by 77 percent; decreased the project vacancy rate from 18 percent to 5 percent; created 102 jobs for residents (10 on its own staff and 92 running other businesses it had started); and helped at least 132 residents get off of welfare. Seven years after it began, crimes had dropped from a 12 to 15 per month to an average of only 2. In the first 15 years of a campaign to further resident education, 700 project youth went on to college after high school (75 percent graduated).
- A community group in a low-income Baltimore neighborhood initiated an all-out war on the local drug trade through a variety of activities, often implemented in partnership with the police and other agencies. These included denying drug dealers the space to conduct their trade (boarding up abandoned buildings, fencing off alleys, etc.); conducting community cleanups and providing additional street lighting; communicating the community's intolerance of drugs (e.g., conducting vigils, holding marches); partnering with an outreach treatment program; and establishing positive alternatives for youth (e.g., special summer programs). Between 1993 and 1995, violent crime decreased by 52 percent and arrests for drugs in the community dropped by 80 percent.
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. - First, more evidence has indicated that the intensification of inner-city problems in the 1980s arose primarily due to a confluence of forces whose impacts became particularly damaging at that time; most important, the loss of manufacturing jobs in the cities (jobs that had once provided decent wages to low-skilled workers) and the loss of community. The latter occurred as large numbers of middle-income households of all races moved to the suburbs, breaking up neighborhood institutions and friendship networks and removing the role models increasingly recognized as critical to developing positive motivations for youth. While the white poor are reasonably spread through our metropolitan regions, racial segregation continues to keep poor people of color concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods, deepening their isolation from the mainstream society.
- Second, while the number of young people in poor neighborhoods who have fallen into debilitating life styles is far from trivial, surveys have shown that for the sizeable majority of residents in those neighborhoods there has been no change in underlying values or life-goals. There is still a strong desire to work for a living and to raise their children to be stable and productive members of society.
- Finally, studies suggested that the fact that our traditional social service system has not been very effective in addressing these problems may be more due to its own structural weaknesses—bureaucratically fragmented services delivered by outside professionals, intervening only in response to crises, seemingly incapable of the more holistic support needed for prevention—than attributes of those being served.
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. Community Building Themes 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. Recommendations (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. Conclusions 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. Index Preface
Executive Summary
Chpt 1: Context & Convergence
Chpt 2: Themes of the New Community Building
Chpt 3: Supporting Broader Applications of Effective Community Building
Appendix, Notes Return to Community Index |
