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Topics: Community

Community Building, continued
Coming of Age

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

Chpt 2: Themes of the New Community Building

Chapter 2: Themes of the New Community Building

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:

• Integrate community development and human service strategies. Traditional anti-poverty efforts have separated the "bricks and mortar" projects from those that help families and develop human capital; each approach needs the other to be successful.

• Forge partnerships through collaboration. Building community requires work by all sectors-local residents, community-based organizations, businesses, schools, religious institutions, health and social service agencies-in an atmosphere of trust, cooperation, and respect.

• Build on community strengths. Past efforts to improve urban life have too often addressed community deficits; our efforts build on local capacities and assets.

• Start from local conditions. There is no cookie-cutter approach to building community; the best efforts flow from and adapt to local realities.
  
• Foster broad community participation. Many urban programs have become professionalized and alienated from the people they serve; new programs and policies must be shaped by community residents.
  
• Require racial equity. Racism remains a barrier to a fair distribution of resources and opportunities in our society; our work promotes equity for all groups.
  
• Value cultural strengths.Our efforts promote the values and history of our many cultural traditions and ethnic groups.
  
• Support families and children. Strong families are the cornerstone of strong communities; our efforts help families help themselves.

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:

1. Focused on specific improvement initiatives in a manner that reinforces values and builds social and human capital;
   
2. Community driven with broad resident involvement;
   
3. Comprehensive, strategic, and entrepreneurial;
   
4. Asset-based;
   
5. Tailored to neighborhood scale and conditions;
   
6. Collaboratively linked to the broader society to strengthen community institutions and enhance outside opportunitiesfor residents; and
   
7. consciously changing institutional barriers and racism. These operating themes are addressed next.

Theme 1: Focused on Specific Improvement Initiatives in a Manner that Reinforces Values and Builds Social and Human Capital.

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

Good family supports and services reduce the need for expensive out-of home placement for children. The Homebuilders program (an effective intervention that helped resolve family problems so children could stay at home) led to direct savings from three to three-and-one-half times the (program) expenditure.

...An Urban Institute study... found that a 50 percent decrease in births to women under the age of eighteen would result, in 1990, in a reduction of $390 million in AFDC payments, $160 million in Medicaid payments and $170 million in food stamps.

Good preschool experiences and a good start in elementary school reduce the need for special education services and improve other outcomes.... An economic analysis of the Perry Preschool program ... found that its initial annual cost of $5,000 per child resulted in a savings of several times that amount because of lower crime rates ($3,000), reduced costs of special education ($5,000) and public assistance ($16,000), and the greater amount of taxes participants were expected to pay ($5,000) in comparison to their non-preschool peers.

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:

Regularly distribute newsletters to all neighborhood residents on changing plans, progress, and upcoming events

Hold regular association meetings to which all residents are invited, with time on the agenda to allow their views to be heard, and other social gatherings to allow residents to get to know each other

Prepare an association statement of principles and strategy regarding involvement of resident in individual projects

Design improvement efforts so that a broad array of residents can participate and reach out to encourage their participation

Provide some mechanism to allow all residents to have a voice in strategic plans and in selecting and validating association leadership.

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.

Theme 3: Comprehensive, Strategic, and Entrepreneurial

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:

Economic opportunity and security: for example, job training and development; neighborhood based financial institutions such as credit unions, development banks, and revolving loan funds; income security programs; and commercial revitalization and development.

Adequate physical development and infrastructure, including housing, transportation, and public amenities and services.

Safety and security, such as community policing, land-use zoning, and crime prevention.

Well functioning institutions and services, including schools, social and health services, libraries, sports leagues, and recreation.

Social capital: promoting a rich social fabric and strong community voice.

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 on that issue and get that job done, but lay the groundwork for broader thinking and action as the initial victory is being won. Recall, that Kenilworth Parkside's ultimately comprehensive program started with a modest effort on just one front.

In other cases, it may make sense to start with a more comprehensive review of opportunities. But, again, it is worth mentioning the need to move into some form of action quickly. The first few meetings might revolve around a fresh look and community assets (see discussion below) and developing a sense of priorities (priorities are determined not only by how comparatively important different issues are, but also by the degree to which you can realistically move ahead to affect them in the short term). It may be that a sizeable group of neighbors feel that one issue is simply dominant; e.g., we can't do anything else until we get the drug dealers out of the neighborhood. In that case, the next thing to do may be to put comprehensiveness on the back burner for a while and get into detailed planning and action for a "signature campaign" on that issue. As you do this, you may be aware that another group feels somewhat left out, because they were more interested in working on, say, helping to strengthen the local elementary school. If so, then as soon as the association's top leadership gets the first signature campaign underway and delegated, it can shift its attention to working with a different group to start the next one. This is very much the way many of today's best community building initiatives are operating.

Theme 4: Asset-Based

An idea that has become important in thinking about this emerging field is that, to be effective, community building needs to be asset-based. John Kretzmann and John McKnight, who have done most to think through this approach, have said that planning community initiatives only from the perspective of solving problems or meeting needs casts a negative tone on what should be an exciting and positive capacity building venture-it perpetuates feelings of dependency and is ultimately self-defeating. In fact, all communities (even distressed urban neighborhoods) have a considerable number and range of assets on which they can build if they will only shift their mind-set and recognize them. Kretzmann and McKnight argue that community building should start by inventorying (mapping) these assets and then finding ways to take advantage of them (use them as the cornerstones) in designing action programs.

Kretzmann and McKnight suggest that assets occur in tiers, which relate to their priority in developing community programs. The first tier (termed primary building blocks) are assets and capacities located inside the neighborhood and largely under neighborhood control. These first include the assets of individuals: the skills, talents, and experience of the residents; businesses operating in the neighborhood; home-based enterprises; the personal income of the residents; and the "gifts of labeled people" (often unrecognized special skills and abilities of, for example, those who are labeled as "mentally ill, disabled, and elderly." Organizational assets in this tier include: associations of businesses; citizens associations, cultural organizations; communications organizations; and religious organizations.

The next tier (secondary building blocks) are assets within the community but largely controlled by outsiders. For example: private and nonprofit organizations such as institutions of higher education, hospitals and social services agencies; physical resources such as vacant land, commercial and industrial structures, housing, and energy and waste resources; and public institutions and services such as public schools, the police, libraries, fire departments and parks.

The final tier (potential building blocks) are resources originating outside the neighborhood and controlled by outsiders. Examples here include welfare expendtures, public capital improvement expenditures, and public information.

Assets in the first tier can be acted on directly, while recognizing those in the latter tiers requires the community to devise strategies for influencing outsiders. Kretzmann and McKnight argue that the very act of inventorying assets changes the orientation of the planning process and increases its potential. It is itself a "community organizing device" that gives residents optimism and, by evidencing opportunities to "change things," motivates participation, collaboration, and commitment to action.

This orientation does not imply, however, that it is wise to ignore (or never monitor) the truly serious problems that do exist in poor neighborhoods. It says simply that the dominant mode for community-based planning and action should be positive and constructive. In such an environment, it becomes possible to frankly recognize and deal with the problems without allowing the "negatives" to be seen as so debilitating that they immobilize action.

Theme 5: Tailored to Neighborhood Scale and Conditions

There are two reasons why community building has to take place at the neighborhood level. The first has to do with scale. City planners have traditionally seen a neighborhood as a unit with around 5,000 - 6,000 people, roughly the size needed to support a single elementary school. This project's seminar participants suggested that community building works best at about that scale; certainly not as well in any area exceeding 10,000 population. The reason is that in larger areas you lose the frequent face to-face interaction-the ability of people to really get to know each other-that is needed to establish mutual trust and mutual obligation. In other words, in areas with more people, it becomes more difficult to build social capital.

The second reason that community building needs to occur at a neighborhood scale is that units of that size in American cities are quite different from each other, and the differences are important in defining workable programs of action. Even among poor neighborhoods, conditions vary in important ways that suggest the need for considerable variation in strategy. Cleveland's Poverty Commission report, for example, cites research done at Case Western Reserve University that demonstrates this point. The researchers first classified neighborhoods by the period in which they became "high poverty areas" (poverty rates in excess of 40 percent). They found:

Areas in high-poverty status since 1970 had all of the signs of severe distress we have discussed in this monograph. Much of their original housing stock had been lost, they had the lowest incomes and high crime rates, and women and children dominated their resident populations. Here, fundamental efforts to reestablish order and build human capacity would be required.

Those that had not entered the high-poverty group until 1980 showed many of the same signs but not to the same degree. They too had lost housing, but the substantial land areas left vacant held more promise for stable redevelopment in the short term. A larger portion of the population was male, suggesting greater opportunity for stabilizing families and the need for different strategies for employment training and job brokering.

Areas that had not become high-poverty neighborhoods until 1990 were generally yet better off. They had retained more of their housing and a larger share of employed males and middle-age husband and wife families. Instead of having to rebuild social capital from scratch, residents could focus on strengthening and extending that which remained. They had a quite different and more promising set of potentials for economic development.

The authors of this study had examined a host of other indicators and cautioned that there were important differences even within these categories. Combining the implications of various indicators, it was clear that, based on the data alone, no one neighborhood's community building approach could be exactly like that for any other. And that is before considering differences in resident preferences, cultures, relationships, and institutional conditions which will always warrant further variations in strategy. In two neighborhoods that look nearly the same on paper, one will have a particular church or youth club with a set of interests and capacities that create opportunities that simply do not exist in the other. 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. Planning how to take best advantage of such opportunities requires sensitive knowledge of the people and the circumstances. Only residents of the neighborhood can do that. This is why community building could never be programmed effectively by planners from city hall, no matter how well meaning, let alone by federal officials.

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 for some functions (e.g., economic development, health care). Where shared objectives exist, collaboration between neighborhoods may be a much more powerful way to achieve them than relying solely on individual neighborhoods acting independently. But such collaborations 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.

Theme 6: Collaboratively Linked to the Broader Society to Strengthen Community Institutions and Enhance Outside Opportunities for Residents

The oratory of some community activists in the past seemed to imply that poor neighborhoods ought to, in effect, secede from the broader society in which they are located-cut the links and develop their own jobs and their own culture so that they become fully self-sufficient. There was something to this oratory in that in might shake people out of attitudes of dependency. However, today's community builders generally recognize that this idea does not make much sense in practice. For example, while neighborhoods should do all they can to develop their internal economies, very few residential neighborhoods anywhere can generate nearly enough jobs in total to support their residents. Henry Cisneros has written:

I am disturbed when people try to make strategic options appear to be in conflict when, in fact, they can be made to blend with a reasonable sense of balance. "People policies" and "place policies" are not polar opposites. I know of no serious integrationist who really thinks it would be best to move all low-income households out to the suburbs, thereby obliterating the still vital (if presently weakened) community assets and institutions that remain in the city. Alternatively, I know of no serious community builder who thinks it appropriate to build a wall around the community-to deny current residents permission to leave or to require that local workers accept jobs only from firms located within the community boundaries.

Healthy communities prepare their young residents to take advantage of the best opportunities they can, wherever they may be located. Because they have sustained important internal assets, many will stay, but it is to be expected that some will leave. A sizeable number of capable local workers will commute to outside jobs every day, but with strong internal assets, they will spend much of their enhanced paychecks in locally owned business establishments. And healthy communities also attract "new blood" from outside . .. The term "gentrification," has, for good reason, become anathema to community builders. But suppose inner city communities actively planned to attract middle-income &mikes back into their neighborhoods, and did it on their own terms without displacement.

Peter Marris points out that three forces are at work, simultaneously contributing to conditions in distressed neighborhoods: (a) sustained economic deprivation; (b) a failure of the mechanisms of social integration; and (c) individual and social pathologies that result from (a) and (b). He believes that community building should be a formulation that encourages us to address all three-not a liberal ideology that focuses only on and (a) and (b), nor a conservative one that focuses only on (c). Arthur Naparstek defines a community building strategy as one that "combines a focus on place with an emphasis on self-help, without rejecting macro policies that are people-based strategies." In other words, community builders have to deal with the broader society. The question is how they should approach it.

The first answer is, "proactively." This term implies that the community cannot simply sit back and wait for what comes from outside-it ought to reach out and try to change things to the extent it can. Community leaders now more often recognize that one of their most serious problems is the devastating isolation of inner city neighborhoods that has emerged in recent years and that they need to find ways to end it. Kretzmann and McKnight's asset-oriented approach says you should concentrate on your internal assets first, but then look to elements of the world outside that can become assets for the neighborhood, and deal with them as well.

To do this, should the community rely on conflict, collaboration, or confrontation? Here, the answer is to use all three, selecting the one that is likely to work best for the situation at hand. In the l990s, community builders are more likely to emphasize collaboration (because they have found that is more likely to get results most often), but conflict is both inevitable and manageable. Confrontation is still sure to be an important tool in some instances. Recall from Section 1 that the New Communities Corporation was collaborating with government officials on a number of fronts, at the same time that it was engaged in a long and hard-fought struggle with them on the housing standards issue. The dramatic progress across the country in community reinvestment by major financial institutions is another example of confrontation leading to collaboration. Leading financial institutions have now changed underwriting practices and established specialized departments, thereby connecting better to communities while still making a profit.

An important arena in which inside-outside relationships are being given priority is the question of economic development and securing sufficient job opportunities for neighborhood residents. New roles and relationships have to be defined, and the best approach is likely to be a mix of direct action and partnerships. For example, one essential is helping local residents become better equipped to work and then helping them find jobs in the broader economy. In this case, the community may have a competitive advantage in taking on some aspects of the "preparation for work" side directly, but when it comes to linking them to outside job opportunities it is likely to make more sense for them to partner with a metropolitan-wide organization. Trying to take on too much-to try to control everything directly-could lead to such overextension that it could demolish the community's capacity to address the basics that only it can do well.

However, a proactive reaching out-networking and partnering with institutions outside the neighborhood-does not imply that community leaders should be satisfied with "business as usual" from their outside partners. A community's new involvement with outside partners offers an opportunity to educate those partners about the realities of what does and does not work in their neighborhoods and to exert influence on them to change practices that have been insensitive to those realities. In other words, being a partner does not mean community leaders cannot advise their new associates (e.g., local public agencies) on how they might change their operating procedures to support community results more effectively.

Theme 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. Confronted with a demand from parents, schools work out new forms of education through collaborations among educators, the community, parents, the private sector, and other public and nonprofit agencies. The famous success of the Beacon School and many charter schools is exactly a product of this process.

Financial institutions confronted by the community with a critical analysis of the community's credit needs and the institution's inadequate response work with community-based organizations, private and nonprofit developers, and the public sector to finance community development projects which serve the community's needs, allow lenders to make a reasonable rate of return within risk parameters acceptable to them, and enable the public sector to leverage its grant money. Sometimes the large systems need to change system-wide, as in the successful reorganization of preschool education in the Oakland school system as facilitated by the Urban Strategies Council (discussed in Chapter 3). At other times, large institutions are drawn incrementally into change as in Grace Hill Settlement's use of technology in a collaboration with the police and the foster care system to create a system of placing children in need of shelter in homes in that neighborhood.

While the calls for institutional change and responsiveness to community have been hallmarks of community building since the early settlement houses, deliberate attempts to bring about change in the last 30 years have shown us just how diffficult it is to structure and maintain a genuine community orientation in large public and private bureaucracies, whether a school system or a multi-state bank. Earlier, more confrontational approaches may have resulted in incremental change, but soon the activists were "back to the streets." The collaborative approach to institutional change takes a longer time but is more sustainable and thoroughgoing. A community building effort draws all sides of the controversy together around a central set of values and binds the participants in relationships of mutual respect. As in all relationships, the coming together is not without conflict over differences, 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 for the common endeavor. One strength of community building is that it focuses on concrete outcomes. Commitment to the product draws participants beyond conventional barriers. Community building is not looking to relationships for the sake of relationships but to productive working arrangements whether or not parties feel comfortable with or like each other.

Since a great deal of the isolation of minority communities is the product of racial discrimination, race matters in community building efforts. Racial prejudice and its more pernicious cousin, institutional racism, can neither be ignored nor made the centerpiece of the collaborative reconnection of the isolated community to the mainstream. Sensitivity is needed but is not the focal point. Rather, 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. Occasionally, community building efforts will launch a direct program of racial awareness, for example, to bring together different populations in the same community or to accommodate cultural and language difference in a common effort. For the most part, however, 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.

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

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