CPN is designed and maintained by ONline @ UW: Electronic Publishing Group.

Contents

Preface
Introduction
Historical and Political Background —Christopher Gates
Philosophy of Community Building — William Lofquist
Accountability in Community Building — Sidney Gardner
Principles of Community Building

Storymaking: United Way and the Transformation of Community

Reprinted with permission from the United Way of America.
Item Number 0996
Copyright © 1996 by United Way of America. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part is not permitted without written approval of the publisher.

Preface

We invite you, our United Way colleagues and community partners, to join us in continuing to learn to build strong communities and to share your stories with us. By committing to support each other in our mission —to help the organized capacity of people to care for one another —we can truly transform our United Way, as well as its local and global communities worldwide.

To help implement the community-building initiative systemwide in United Way, its National Professional Council established the Committee on Community Building. The committee held the Leadership Symposium on April 18, 1996, in Nashville. At the symposium, participants benefited from the unique opportunity to learn not only from the professional experiences of experts, but also from the personal experiences of their United Way colleagues.

Story-Making: United Way and Community Building provides readers an opportunity to learn from the professional and practical experiences of the symposium participants. Each participant's story about local initiatives in community building is unique. Each story summarizes the challenges specific to that United Way, describes the innovative solutions to strengthen community, and offers invaluable suggestions for our United Way colleagues and partners.

If you want to discuss ideas presented in any of the stories, contact the person relating the story. Also, we encourage you to develop your own initiatives, partners, resources, and solutions and to write your own community-building story. Help write the next story-making chapter on community building by completing the "Identifying Community-Building Resources Form" provided at the end of the book. Reporting your learning experiences and offering your suggestions will help others build their communities through local initiatives.

As a consultant to United Way, Mr. Rollie Smith helped plan, and then chaired, the Leadership Symposium. Also, he helped write Story-Making: United Way and Community Building. Mr. Smith has been a volunteer leader, a critique, and a fan of United Way for many years and has worked with United Ways in California, Hawaii, Ohio, and Arizona.

Introduction

The new mission of United Way is to help increase the organized capacity of people to care for one another. The mission, established in the strategic directions of Focus 2000: Our Commitment to the Future (June 22, 1995), represents a major change of focus for United Way.

The mission's first strategic priority articulates that change as "adding value to the community beyond that of the independent efforts of agencies in the area of health and human services." As our collective declaration implies, United Way is not a mere funder of agencies. As a community fund, it is a critical link through which all community participants build stronger, healthier, and more sustainable communities.

The transformation is revolutionary. Many United Ways are replacing a social welfare approach in which agencies provide services to clients, described by their deficiencies, with a community-building initiative for collecting and concentrating energy and resources. Although not the intention of the collective membership of the United Way of America as expressed in its strategic directions, we recognize that often we are caught in a social welfare approach. Such an approach can unintentionally undermine community initiative and responsibility. Community-building initiatives, the new approach, ensure that:

• People, while acknowledging their needs, combine their strengths to create sustaining relationships to care for one another, that is, community-based power.
  
• Agencies serve as instruments for people to take care of one another in community rather than act as tools for funders and professionals to take care of clients.
  
• Professionals transform their roles from providers of services to prodders of community strength.
  
• Local communities sustain vigorous civil society with its free associations, neighborhoods, and local decision making by linking the social, economic, political, and spiritual dimensions of human development.

The National Professional Council established the Committee on Community Building to influence systemic change toward a community-building approach in local United Ways. The Committee on Community Building held the Leadership Symposium in Nashville on April 18, 1996, for the purpose of furthering efforts to implement the community-building initiative throughout the United Way system. The proceedings of that symposium include summaries of presentations, an update in experiments in community building by various United Ways, lessons learned through these experiments, and recommendations for further action. The symposium proceedings tell the story of community building in local United Ways thus far.

In Story-Making: United Way and Community Building, twenty participants of the leadership symposium share their personal experiences and lessons learned about community building in their local United Ways, as well as offer advice to our colleagues and the United Way of America. Their stories show that community building is not a linear process; there is no recipe; it is an experimental, time consuming process. The storymakers share their successes in finding new resources, new partners, and new actions — some never before thought of. Their lessons, reflections, and evaluations of their unique experiences offer invaluable ideas for those who will accept the challenge of continuing the community-building initiative at their United Way.

Three friends — Christopher Gates, William Lofquist, and Sidney Gardner — set the stage for the symposium by sharing their professional expertise, based on their experiences and insights into building communities. Mr. Gates, president of the National Civic League, articulated our exceptional historical and political background that now calls for a new kind of community-building approach. Mr. Gardner, director of the Center for Collaboration for Children at California State University, articulated the test that needs to be applied for effectiveness in community building in the '9Os. Mr. Lofquist, director of Associates for Youth Development, articulated the theory and rationale of building community that positions us for moving from treatment and reaction to prevention and innovation.

Historical and Political Background
- Christopher Gates

The National Civic League was founded in 1894 by persons who saw a need for supporting direct democracy at the local level in distinction to indirect representative democracy at the national level. Again today, when people are effectively disenfranchised at the local level, we need to reaffirm this philosophy.

The corporate and governmental elite, who come from all organizational sectors including nonprofit, are now setting the agenda. The task for those affirming a democratic civil society is to establish or reinforce local vehicles for citizen discussion and decision making vis-a-vis government, business, and nonprofit organizations.

Because government is an institution run by representatives largely supported by monied interests, it is virtually impossible for government to develop a proactive agenda. Citizens need to develop a place at the table of decision making. Nonprofit organizations can play a role to make this happen; also, they can be a substitute for, therefore, a hindrance to true citizen participation.

Interest Theory

The dominant political theory in American politics today is the interest theory. This theory focuses both attention and action on issues. Often, NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) issues provoke a shift of "problems" from where there is a lot of organized opposition to where there is little. This strategy neither encourages the opportunity to negotiate nor initiates local political dialogue. The NIMBY movement is reactive and creates a new breed of citizen activists: CAVE or Citizens Against Virtually Everything.

To transcend interest theory and build a proactive politics based on values rather then on issues requires recognizing that the new paradigm is that there is no paradigm. We are "in between" paradigms. We can either look back with nostalgia and try to restore what was. Or, we can hope against hope pretending that we see the future. What we need is to reaffirm the values of the past and rebuild a future through inclusive democratic community building.

To start such a task, we must acknowledge the new political realities that we might not like and may want to argue against. But, the worst thing we can do is to neglect or deny them. Some of the new realities are:

• Less public funding will be available.
• Federal government will shift more responsibility to local government.
• Local institutions will have more power over local decision making.
• Collaboration and interdependence among institutions is demanded.
• New strategies and tools to organize persons locally are required.
• Community power is thinly distributed within an environment of widespread mistrust.
• Diversity and its demands are increasing.

Lessons Learned through our meeting with Chris Gates include:

• Nonprofit agencies, under the control of the same elites that set the political agenda, are part of the environment in which citizens are virtually excluded from the table. Our United Way agencies often act as surrogates for, rather than promoters of, citizen participation and ownership.
  
• New realities of the current political situation call for us to develop new directions and approaches in community building. We deny or neglect such realities at the peril of irrelevancy to our own mission.
  
• Local United Ways have excellent opportunities to build, host, set, or at least be in attendance at tables for direct local democracy. This presence means acknowledging that we may often be part of the problem and are choosing a path of inclusion and risk.
  
• Our process of community building involves bringing people to the table we have not included in the past; embracing diversity not only for representation, but also as a goal of social justice; going beyond reactionary interest politics toward proactively inviting citizens to establish a new politics based on values and principles rather than issues.

Philosophy of Community Building
- William Lofquist

Our five basic institutions —family, government, education, economic, and religion — inculcate the twin issues of fragmentation and alienation. Fragmentation addresses our systemic reality; alienation addresses the reality of our relationships. Our human service systems, which are essentially dysfunctional for today's world, contribute to rather than alleviate these two issues. Change is required that must move from the incremental, which merely arranges elements in the status quo, to the fundamental, which transforms community.

Transformational Change

Transformational change means moving from problem-solving to development and from individuals to conditions. Four quadrants of action of transformational change are:

• Community development
• Community problem solving
• Personal development
• Personal problem solving

The task is to move out of personal problem solving into community development, through personal development and community problem-solving. Personal crises are prevented by creating conditions and opportunities for persons in community. The dysfunctional human service system advances by reducing the system of care to community problems and personal crises.

The five paths to community building are:

• Culture. Culture includes retrieving the shared values, beliefs, assumptions, principles, and norms of the group.
  
• Leadership development. Developing leadership can enable persons to move from being recipient objects to initiating subjects of change.
  
• Community integration. Integrating communities enhances the collaborative relationships among people and their institutions.
  
• Organizational transformation. Such transformation renews organizations through which persons operate in community.
  
• Institutionalizing new reality. Restructuring the very institutions that support organizations will realize new realities.

To restructure our human service system and overcome the alienation and fragmentation that persons experience, we are called to a long-term strategy of community building. This strategy will engage a broad spectrum of people and organizations within our community beyond incremental change to transformational change. Such a change means that we will do things fundamentally different from how we are doing them now. United Way is well positioned to lead in this endeavor.

Lessons Learned through our interaction with Bill Lofquist include:

• Language is important. For example, speaking of people as "cases" or as "leaders," "clients" or "participants" may result in different ways of dealing with people. So does our language of "agency" or "community organization," "rescue" or "development." We need to promote a new language in United Way.
  
• Community building demands a focus on assets, as John McKnight and others emphasize. In United Way we must have a balance between "needs assessments" and "asset assessments." The goal is to build on strengths rather than to fill in weaknesses.
  
• United Way is a learning organization in a learning community, as described by Peter Senge. This means we are continually learning through experimentation and reflection in a process in which we engage others in our communal systems. Failures provide us with more opportunities to learn. They are merely temporary set-backs.
  
• United Way is part of a dysfunctional human service system that demands fundamental change. We should acknowledge our role in maintaining this system and our responsibility for changing it. This gives us a great opportunity for renewal and leadership.
  
• There is a technology for community building. There are numerous ways that we can learn to engage in transforming our organizations and our communities. At the same time there is no one way; we need to be open, flexible, and continually learning.

Accountability in Community Building
- Sidney Gardner

Collaboration can be a word without substance. The reality test for collaborative efforts is not the number of meetings or the number of organizational representatives participating in various activities, but rather results-based evaluation. This means it is important to establish and carry out a community scorecard.

Community Scorecard

Establishing and implementing a community scorecard can:

• Re-establish credibility lost by well-intentioned and often costly initiatives that have left the community as it is.
• Use and redirect assets, including the vast amount of federal dollars, already being invested in a community.
• Inspire the community to act together, not just start more initiatives that are usually agency centered.
• Transcend some of the old measures, for example, school test scores, which maintain us in current, and nonproductive, approaches that do not use existing resources well.

Who is using it? Many communities, for example, Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii are setting broad-based community scorecards. But, there is no one framework. Different frameworks are more appropriate for different communities.

How do you implement a community scoreboard? Some critical steps include:

• Be inclusive and comprehensive. Don't divide into programmatic groups. Keep out of the usual boxes.
• Inventory all the assets. It is important to go beyond the McKnight asset mapping to include public sector resources.
• Set true priorities.
• Establish a short list of achievable indicators.

What are some of the pitfalls? Some pitfalls include:

• Overpromising.Don't promise what you cannot deliver. Keep the indicators brief and attainable.
  
• Collaboration. Don't think that just because a lot of people and organizations are working together that anything is being done.
  
• Providers. Get to what is important to the people in the community, not the providers' self-interests.
  
• Neglecting the public sector.The public/private balance is important. While recognizing that there may be no more public dollars, public investment is significant and needs to be redirected nevertheless.
  
• Inflexibility. Maintain flexibility in working with community. Avoid step-by-step approaches or set models.

Lessons Learned while interacting with Sid Gardner include:

• Evaluation must be built into our community-building efforts, but a very special kind of evaluation. Such an evaluation focuses on specific, qualitative outcomes, which are based on a community scorecard.
  
• Evaluations based on a community scorecard represents a major shift in most United Ways. These evaluations can focus on the process of communities establishing their expectations, benchmarks and indicators, and scoring effectiveness in achieving them. Contrasted with these evaluations are the often used outside detached evaluations or agency reports that only provide anecdotes and numbers of inputs.
  
• Collaboration, which is essential, needs to be real. We need to engage in collaborations that are truly effective and accountable.
  
• Local United Ways are often the most important conveners and vehicles for establishing accountability and redirection of community resources through a process of community benchmarks and indicators. Each United Way should seriously look at its role in establishing such a process.

After sharing our stories at the Leadership Symposium about our efforts in community building, we identified the following principles of community building that we were learning:

• Partnership. People are agents of action, not objects. We do with, not for, people, their communities, and their organizations.
  
• Inclusion. Diversity is desirable. We are not an exclusive club. We help set a table for all who want to act together.
  
• Assets. Caring communities are built on strengths from the inside-out. Although we acknowledge limits and needs, we focus on capacities and link them.
  
• Results. Motivation comes from a concrete vision. Although we attend to numbers of participants and actions, we judge ourselves by the results that have been established by a free and open community process.
  
• Integrity. All functions are integrated into our mission and vision. Community building is neither an add-on nor a separate project. All that we do is oriented toward strengthening of caring communities.
  
• Holistic. Human community has many interacting dimensions. In strengthening the social infrastructure of community, we connect to the economic, political, personal, and spiritual dimensions.
  
• Learning. Thriving communities and organizations are continually learning. We recognize that we are at different points of understanding and that growth demands a total system approach in which we are all brought along together.

Index

Preface
Introduction
Historical and Political Background —Christopher Gates
Philosophy of Community Building — William Lofquist
Accountability in Community Building — Sidney Gardner
Principles of Community Building
Story-Making and Community Building
Recommendations for United Way of America
Writing the Next Story-Making

Back to Community Index