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R. Kordesh, 1994 Economic CapacitiesStrong families exercise five economic capacities that overlap with the workings of businesses, unions, employers, and other formal economic organizations. As shown in Table 1, the capacities of families also overlap with formal institutions in the political, social, and religio-cultural realms. Families exercise economic capacities by producing goods and services that also could be acquired through the market. Some families still operate their own farms, and many others grow fruits and vegetables and bake their own bread. Making meals "from scratch" is a form of economic productivity that is otherwise exercised by restaurants. Families also produce other goods that would be consumed on the market: they make clothing; some families build their own houses or at least repair their homes; they landscape their own properties, fix their cars, and sometimes make their own children's toys. Families also provide support for dependents who experience economic difficulties. Parents supplement the incomes of their adult children who are making the increasingly difficult transition from school to work, loaning money and offering housing and meals during periods of unemployment or cash shortages. Some of the tasks of adult daily living that families help their frail and elderly members with are economic: shopping, repairing roofs, mowing lawns, managing bank accounts, and cooking meals. In addition to delivering direct economic support to members, strong families make formal economic institutions more productive by socializing strong work habits into children who will work and adults who already work. Many businesses take contradictory stances toward families: they decry the decline in work habits that has resulted from family breakdown, and yet resist recommendations to institute leave policies and other benefits that would lessen the conflicting tensions between the work and family responsibilities of employees. Families also affect formal economic organizations by influencing the internal practices of those organizations. Workers can humanize a sterile factory or office work environment by bringing some of their own family culture into the work setting. They bring pictures of children, wear clothes that are gifts from family, and bring mementos to decorate their offices. Workers also bring family culture and values into the place of employment when they press for family and medical leave benefits or flex time schedules that allow them to return home at the same time as their school-aged children. Family culture can penetrate a work environment on birthdays or other celebrations when workers bring dishes made from family/ethnic recipes for colleagues to share. If the family culture reinforces discipline and the motivation to do high quality work, these symbols from home and from an extended family's ethnic traditions can reinforce positive work habits. Strong family cultures can help renew sterile, bureaucratic work settings, infusing them with a family's sense of purpose and compassion. Strong families also are capable of participating in the governance of economic organizations and in the shaping of public policies germane to economic development. Although this capacity is exercised least often by families, it is nevertheless possible to envision its functioning. Mothers and fathers can advocate planning and zoning decisions that strike a healthy balance among economic development, neighborhood residential stability, and environmental protection. If sufficiently organized, families may press cities to integrate family support programs into their comprehensive plans (which are often dominated by economic development concerns). They could mount consumer boycotts against companies, television stations, and radio stations that produce products and broadcast programs that demean or undermine family life. When sociologists describe the loss of functions experienced by families over the decades, economic capacities are among the functions cited as being in decline. The types of families that are increasing—single-parent families, families with two working parents, older couples living alone, unrelated and unmarried couples sharing living quarters—are far less capable than the pre-industrial patriarchal-holistic families who operated their own farms or small businesses. The latter families operated part of their economy within their family domains: they made more of their own goods, grew more of their own food, created their own economic practices and work settings, and set more of their own economic policies. Through the fathers, they also wielded influence over local development practices through a more open and accessible politics. Social CapacitiesFamilies produce social goods as well as economic goods. Families teach children many of the social and personal skills needed to function in their neighborhoods, schools, homes, and as they get older, the larger society. Language ability is first gained through families. The abilities to converse, negotiate, cooperate, argue, engage in conflict, and barter are first imparted by families. Children who are not "ready to learn" by the age of five have not been bequeathed these social goods by their families. This productive function of families is taken for granted until it breaks down. Then, disciplinary problems surface in schools, performances decline, and the spiral of failure in a young person's life must be halted by formal interventions. Families also deliver care and support to members when the normal production of social goods breaks down. Families care for ill and injured members who do not require hospitalization or formal health care. They care for and support the grieving, and administer support to handicapped members. They guide blind members who need help navigating hallways and crowded rooms in the home. They help tutor youngsters experiencing difficulty in school. They counsel members discouraged by events in their social lives. They buttress and monitor pregnant mothers. They bathe and feed homebound grandparents and spouses. In addition to producing social goods and delivering care and support, families undergird the services of formal institutions by reinforcing the care or teaching they deliver or by encouraging the member receiving the service to participate in an active and positive way, ensuring maximum yield of benefits. Parents encourage children to complete their homework and reward good school performance. Families make sure that sick members take their prescribed medicines or that injured members undertake their prescribed exercises or other therapeutic activities. Without these reinforcements from families, hospitals, schools, and other formal institutions would be far less effective in healing, teaching, and caring. Formal social institutions also need families to help renew and normalize their internal practices. Service, education, and health agencies have been criticized for becoming unwieldy and impersonal bureaucratic organizations. The penetration of these powerful institutions by the language, symbols, and practices of families and their cultural traditions can help humanize them. A father who visits his first grader during her lunch period at school can engage her and her friends in conversation about home life. He can make her family more present to her and others. He can talk with her teacher about his daughter's performance and learning style and can inform the teacher about her reading and drawing practices at home. Family members visiting their grandparents or other elders in hospitals or nursing homes can bring them blankets, meals, pictures, and other symbols of the family and its habits. They can tell nurses, physicians, and other staff about the elder's home life and family, equipping them with stories and information that the staff can draw on to make the older person's surroundings and conversation more continuous with home and family. In short, strong families possess the capacity to penetrate the bureaucratic and rationalistic culture of formal institutions with their own language and social customs. Just as families can influence the design and policies of economic organizations, they also can influence the design and policies of social organizations. Parents can run in school board elections, sit on boards of nonprofit organizations, and become active at the local, state, and federal levels in organizations that shape social policy. As will be discussed below, such organizations often adopt awkward procedures that reflect institutional ambivalence about family perspectives: they create special "parent" slots on the deliberative bodies, apparently exempting those not occupying such slots from having to think like family members, even though most are just that. Political CapacitiesThe political capacities of families are most neglected by the family empowerment literature. Strong families make policies that govern their lives. These policies are the political goods produced directly by families. Weak, disempowered, and fragmented families have little ability to issue the rules, regulations, and standards that will govern their own lives. For instance, strong families set clear and consistent rules of behavior governing relationships, handling of internal disputes, chores, duties, property handling, and budgets. They make policies about how family land is to be used, and how the space in the home is to be allocated to different functions. They establish menus and health practices. If they do so democratically, they also produce members more practiced in democratic citizenship who are better prepared for civic roles outside of the family (Coles, 1986). Families reduced to the social, affective function that remains after all other capacities have been drained produce few such policies and exercise little capacity for self-governance. Families also can support and nurture members who become unable to participate in governance decisions through infirmity, personal crisis, or some other malady. Families can help members through experiences of powerlessness. In a democracy, this is no minor task. Effective citizenship, whether within or outside the family setting, requires confidence, clarity in position, the ability to argue, and other powers. Families who are strong, affirming, and respectful of their members will be better equipped to get members through crises of confidence, discouragement, or alienation that prevent them from participating as citizens. The wounds of class or racial hatred endured outside the home are more easily healed in a child when that child can be buttressed by a strong, nurturing, and resilient family. Strong families repair the brokenness in their members, making them capable of venturing into the public realm as citizens. Weak families cannot defend their members against such wounding experiences; worse still, they sometimes deepen the wounds through violence, abuse, and neglect. Families also bolster formal political institutions (elections, parties, associations, town meetings, etc.) by nurturing and encouraging strong citizenship in their members (Elshtain, 1990). They not only encourage participation in a quantitative sense, but enhance the quality of debate and decision making by encouraging members to act as responsible citizens. They can ensure that members are informed about public issues if they discuss such issues at home. They can help widen the perspectives of children through the selection of television programs, movies, and books that expose them to political problems and processes. Younger members can help elder members to stay informed by engaging them in political conversations. Families that make reasoned and intense political discussion a normal practice are more likely to produce capable citizens. Another important political capacity of a strong family is the ability to renew political institutions such as parties, neighborhood associations, and agencies. Whereas in the social realm, families exercise this function by helping to normalize social service and health care institutions, in the political realm families can help to humanize governing institutions. Although this capacity may be harder to envision given the usual separation between family life and political life, it is true nevertheless that some strong families manage to make the culture and practices of political institutions more vital. Indeed, in some localities, some of the most vital families produce generations of good political leaders. These families are not necessarily the most wealthy. They bring a sense of the history, purpose, and integrity nurtured in their home life into associations with their localities. If families were generally stronger and better institutional links existed between families and politics, this capacity to revitalize political associations would be more evident in everyday political life. Finally, families possess the capacity, however unfulfilled in contemporary politics, to participate in policy making at the local, state, and federal levels. Families can collectively press for zoning and land use policies at the local level that make for safer, more attractive, and stable neighborhoods. They can mobilize at the state level for education policies that require schools to be responsive to parental concerns. They can press at the national level for family and medical leave. Some groups, such as the relatively new organization called Parent ACTION, struggle to build a broad and effective coalition of parents because of the traditional separation of politics and families. This separation has deep historical roots and endures because of the myriad forces that reinforce the fierce privatism of family life. As is true of all of the family's political capacities, the ability to influence policy making is largely unrealized. Yet, if "family empowerment" is to be taken seriously, the family must become a more significant political as well as private institution. Religio-Cultural CapacitiesThe religio-cultural capacities of families refer to the creation of symbols, rituals, stories, and spiritual practices that give depth and meaning to everyday life (Coles, 1990; Thompson, 1989). Strong families produce religio-cultural goods through their own prayer, worship, and symbolic activities. Many families pray together at meal time. They adorn their homes with religious symbols. They create ritualistic ways of celebrating holidays. These rituals often encourage storytelling that imparts the extended family's history from the old to the young. Families also possess the capacity to counsel and support members when their meaning systems break down. Families with solid religious beliefs and cultural identity can buttress the faith and identity of adolescents confronted with moral confusion at school, in the neighborhood, or among their peer groups (Bayme, 1990). African-American families can help children in a white-dominated society maintain the moral compass derived from centuries-old African traditions. Jewish families help buttress members against the humiliations of anti-Semitism. Strong religious faith reinforced through family practices can help a young person hold firm to moral standards when in many settings such standards are often compromised or nonexistent. Many of the deepest crises of young people involve identity and meaning; strong families provide support when such crises emerge. Families help undergird religious and cultural institutions by developing in their members an appreciation of the religious and symbolic dimensions of life. They also can help reinforce the teachings and practices of such institutions by complementing them with home-based teaching and practices. Through conversation, reading, encouragement, and shows of interest, parents can create a continuity in a child's cultural life between church or synagogue and home. By making religious and moral issues part of normal family conversation, families strengthen their members' interest in and comfort with such issues, making it more likely that they will be able to contribute to such conversations and other activities in the formal institutions. This continuity is important between religious institutions and families, but it is also important for the relationships between families and community theaters, museums, and historical celebrations in localities (Bellah et al., 1991). At times the formal institutions themselves become stagnant or lose a sense of their history or mission. Community theaters can become consumed by budget considerations, create career ladders for performers, or become largely focused on the technical quality of performances. Museums can lose their bearing in the quest for national visibility and status with other museums. Churches can lose their moorings when clergy become preoccupied by personal careerism. Congregations can become lost in the technical and monetary issues of building campaigns. Strong families who are active in these formal associations can reinvigorate such institutions by reminding them of their missions. They can restart the conversations about moral and spiritual concerns that wind down when technical, monetary, or careerist concerns predominate. Churches that invest in the moral development of their families one day will benefit when those families in whom such moral capital was deposited are able to return the investment. Lastly, families can participate in the governance of religious and cultural institutions. They can serve on boards, consistories, and councils. They can ensure through policy making and the design of programs that institutional practices will respond to and be supportive of family life, including staff, board membership, and the larger publics served by the institution. The Market and Family Disempowerment Contrary to what many may believe, the expanding market economy, not the welfare state, initiated and then intensified the trends that led to the decline of the family's productive capacities. Up through the early part of the nineteenth century farm families and small-shop artisan families operated what Sellers refer to as a "subsistence" economy, emphasizing the use value, rather than the commodity (market) value of what they produced. As described by Sellers (1991, p. 10): Farm people's overriding priority was to maintain and reproduce the family's subsistence way of life. Like other premarket peoples (such as the Native Americans), they practiced a hard-won folk wisdom about how to utilize their labor-power and technology to extract sufficient use values from their resource base. But, as Skolnick explains, the urbanizing trends demanded by industrialization and the complementary, individualistic political ideologies that were emerging with those trends gradually caused a split between the previously unified work lives and home lives of families (Skolnick, 1991, p. 30): These changes led to a profound alteration in the function and meaning of family life, as well as in the relations between family and society. They separated home and work, and transformed men's, women's, and children's roles both inside and outside the family. Instead of an economic enterprise in which family worked side by side with hired hands, servants or apprentices, the family came to be defined as a man who went out to work and a woman who stayed home to keep house and care for the children. With fathers working away from the home, the family became less able to produce its own food, clothing, and other necessities and more dependent on acquiring such goods through consumer markets. The number of families who earned their income through factory wages vastly increased, and became vulnerable to business cycles, hiring practices, and investment decisions of banks, government policies (that encouraged railroad construction, for instance), and private corporations. The exiting of economic functions from the family setting has proceeded steadily from the nineteenth century through the present, with many families now exercising virtually no productive economic capacities. Over one half of all mothers of young children in the United States work outside the home, leaving little time for producing any basic goods. Many middle-class families with two working parents even purchase basic maintenance services—housecleaning, shopping, lawn care, pet care—through the market. Moving from a producing unit to a consuming unit makes the family less powerful in relation to formal institutions outside the family. It makes families more vulnerable to market forces: the impacts of layoffs and inflation are harder on families with no productive capacities. In addition, as consumers families have limited leverage with major corporate institutions. There are few effective consumer collectives through which families can influence corporate policies. Labor unions grow weaker with each recession and each new round of layoffs and job eliminations. In addition, the consumer role is an intrinsically weak one in relation to a large corporation that makes production decisions: consumers are inherently individualized and their perspectives are inherently narrow; corporations are inherently collectivized and their perspectives are inherently global. The ironic relationship between businesses (especially large businesses and firms that manage large investment portfolios) and families is that although many businesses recognize the importance of strong families in helping to develop well-disciplined and productive workers, the expansion of the market economy has helped drain families of their productive economic capacities. Families that are weak economically will become more vulnerable as social and cultural units as well. Families that do not produce their own goods, work outside the home, and define their economic power in terms of their capacities to consume (which further subdivides and individualizes families) are weaker economic units than the holistic families of the pre-industrial era. This relative economic weakness undermines their social stability as well as economic self-sufficiency. In short, left to its own devices the market economy (whether expanding or contracting) tends to disempower families. When it expands, it reallocates more productive capacities from families to formal business units by drawing more members into the workforce. When it contracts, jobs are lost, thereby lessening the family's consumer power. When families do not produce anything together, they suffer as social and cultural units as well as economic units. Growing food, creating a garden, constructing a barn, and making clothing constitute practices through which developmental activities for children, adults, and older members can be organized. Discipline and moral teachings may be practiced through farming and gardening. Making furniture may be a joint activity of parents, grandparents, and children, helping to undergird their sense of common goals and standards of excellence. The family identity can be symbolized in the things it builds and names; a garden designed, planted, and tended by fathers, mothers, and children becomes more an extension of the family than the local supermarket ever could. It also helps to bond them physically and symbolically with the earth. The market economy has bifurcated production and consumption, and has stripped most families of most of their productive powers; it has gradually reorganized and helped to disempower the family as a result. Mass advertising, especially through television, reinforces this bifurcation by glorifying consumption at the earliest stages of life. Schools, social services, and child care professionals also have an ironic relationship to family empowerment: their institutions too have grown by attempting to assume the capacities of families. Before industrialization, parents did more of the teaching, counseling, and child care than they do today. Yet, the most vocal advocates of family empowerment may be found in the domain of social and educational policy. The economic disempowerment of families described earlier makes families, both poor and nonpoor, more vulnerable to social problems as well. Unemployment and lack of income create stresses in families that heighten the likelihood of abusive relationships, marital instability, and neglect of children. Such increases drive up demand for human services, but such services depend on some family involvement and stability to carry out successful interventions. Families that are unstable socially will be less capable of having their young children ready to learn when they enter school. They will be less capable of reinforcing good study habits and providing a home environment that encourages high academic achievement. Schools also recognize that they cannot succeed in educating children if children do not live in viable families. Like the businesses, schools and social service agencies are also caught in the same ironic relationship to family power: these organizations depend on such power, but have thrived on its loss by families. III. Family Empowerment and Community Building Introduction The decline of community has devastated families. Reflecting a growing recognition of such effects, emerging family policies are being crafted with a more conscious intent to improve the community fabric around families. However,; families themselves must be enabled to contribute to community building in all four domains: economic, political, social, and religio-cultural. Community building requires family empowerment, just as family support requires the strengthening of community. Strong families—powerful families—are critically needed for community building. As argued in section I, the tendency in policy discussions to conflate locality and community creates a penchant to confuse human service system building and community building. Thus, many human service collaboratives comprised predominately of formal service organizations are making strong and often overstated claims to be "community" collaboratives. Although such partnerships may bring many positive changes for families, the ambiguity they promote with respect to the meaning of community helps to prevent the development of strong community building initiatives and obscures the necessity of engaging families as agents of, rather than only beneficiaries of, community building. Many of the forces that have disempowered families also have eroded communities. The strong communities that still exist use a variety of practices—community planning, cultural events, religious worship, political events, community markets, fairs, and others—to define and build common foundations among people within the dynamism and diversity of modern localities. Like families, communities also have functions that have eroded over time. Like families, communities have been disempowered by this erosion. Whereas families need strong communities in which to live, learn, work, worship, and play, communities need families to be empowered to help rebuild them. What characteristics distinguish communities from mere localities? How do these characteristics strengthen family capacities? Communities affirm values that support families in their productive and caregiving activities. For instance, communities that emphasize the importance of parent-child attachment will construct diverse activities that increase the time spent by parents with children. Communities that place a high priority on the value of family health will make exercise, nutritious family diets, and hygienic living common practices. Communities that place a high value on the dignity of elders will mobilize resources to support families that are caring for partially disabled elderly members. Not only will such practices organize tangible resources to support a family's creative and caregiving powers, but they also will generate symbols that invoke the values held in high esteem in a community. Communities construct shared histories among people and institutions that provide a stronger moral context and sense of connectedness. This in turn can bolster families' creative and caregiving roles. Communities use such histories to celebrate and legitimate traditions of care and partnership between families and are formal institutions supported by public policies. By creating practices that allow churches, civic associations, schools, museums, and others to relate coherent and accessible memories and stories of powerful and nurturing families, communities are better able to communicate and renew these strong family traditions through succeeding generations of families. Communities build attachment to the shared places in which diverse people live and work. In an eloquent discussion of the importance of place as a grounding force in community, Kemmis describes how the declining awareness of places contributes to the weakening of the political community (1990, p.7): Public life as we all too often experience it now is very much like a Big Mac—it can be replicated, in exactly the same form, anywhere. And just as our acceptance of placeless "food," consumed under placeless yellow "landmarks," weakens both our sense of food and of place, so too does the general placelessness of our political thought weaken both our sense of politics and of place. This weakening is foreshadowed by the demise of the word "republic," but it is also implicit in the infrequency with which we use the term "political culture." No real culture—whether we speak of food or of politics or of anything else—can exist in abstraction from place. Yet that abstraction is one of the hallmarks of our time. A community that allows its identity to be shaped by its place adds one more powerful building block to its distinctive foundation. More unified communities have more power to make diverse institutions work together and to structure supportive practices for families. Communities establish a spirit of interconnectedness among diverse individuals and institutions. A spirit of connectedness rests in the more intangible forces—compassion, affection, loyalty, love—that religious and symbolic rituals can stimulate among people. When prevalent among people, such forces can move them to share their resources, risk their status for the common good, and make sacrifices on behalf of others. Cooperation becomes more possible when a spirit of connectedness is active among people because interests and goods that may be at stake are more likely to be viewed as common goods. Communities can construct common visions of their future. Common visions can undergird a sense of common mission to build healthy environments for children, the elderly, and their families. Unified visions among people of school reform make it more possible to achieve reforms that will produce better educational outcomes. Communities that share visions of good neighborhoods for families will be more capable of agreeing on and pursuing strategies to build such neighborhoods. These elements of community are mutually reinforcing. Shared values help lead to shared visions. A common attachment to a place helps build a sense of interconnectedness among those who inhabit the place. Shared histories help give meaning and substance to shared visions by showing how future developments can carry forward the work of families from previous generations. Relating past to present to future through common historical threads and symbols builds continuity across generations that solidifies community. An appreciation that all such generations have inhabited visions. the same place can further ingrain the sense of intergenerational continuity. Strong communities can give greater encouragement to families to be creative, productive, nurturing, and capable of acting through public roles to improve the quality of formal institutions. These elements of community may sound utopian or unreachable, but this quality reflects the degree of the community's decline in recent decades. Undeniably, many families experience little of the community outlined above. Yet, it also is clear that as the community around families has declined, the stresses experienced in rearing children, producing healthy members, educating adolescents, and coping with the increasing demands of older members living well into their seventies have increased. The isolation and break-up of the family are products of both long-term trends and more recent developments that have weakened communities as well (Skolnick, 1991). Decline of Community Around Family In recent decades, the capacities of communities to support families have diminished considerably. As Etzioni points out, the suffering of families and deterioration of communities are mutually related (1993, p. 134): Just as American society since the fifties has been cannibalizing families and is now saddled with the direct moral and social consequences of their diminished capacity, so society has cannibalized communities, with similar antisocial consequences. In effect, the two often go hand in hand. As both parents commute to work in the big city, leaving the children without the educational presence of an adult, they abandon the streets, public spaces (from bus stops to parks), and neighborhoods as well. Local governments must now hire police to patrol largely empty suburbs during the day, and there are fewer hands than before to serve the community. The decline of community around families can be seen in social, political, economic, and physical design changes that have subdivided municipalities into specialized districts, segregating families by income groups into homogeneous enclaves. Endangered Social Ecologies"Social ecologies" for families—neighborhoods, extended families, friendship groups, churches—have not disappeared, but have been gradually weakening for many decades. Families still live in residential districts inhabited by other families, but the cohesiveness and internal organization of these enclaves have diminished. Fear of crime keeps people from walking neighborhood streets, from mixing with neighbors they do not trust, and from participating in the kids of "streetlife" that make neighborhood cohesiveness possible. For children who live in neighborhoods with high rates of violence, their earliest experiences of their social ecologies can foster suspicion and defensiveness rather than the traits necessary to live in a viable community. As noted by Garbarino et al. (1992, p.10): In the development process, the child forms a picture or draws a map of the world and his or her place in it. As children draw these maps, they move forward on the paths they believe exist. If a child's map of the world depicts people and places as hostile, and the child as an insignificant speck relegated to one small corner, we must expect troubled development of one sort or another: a life of suspicion, low self-esteem, self-denigration, and perhaps violence and rage. Violence as a common presence in neighborhoods signals the fragility of a community. Churches, schools, shops, and other institutions no longer serve neighborhoods (they serve larger regions) and therefore no longer function as integrative hubs where families can interact and find mutual interests. In suburbs where crime might not be the concern that it is in cities, many neighborhoods are essentially vacated during the day: adults go to work, children attend schools or day care. In many housing developments, the only appreciable streetlife is the coming and going of cleaning persons, mail carriers, and lawn care professionals. In addition to the decline of community within neighborhoods, the social ecologies of families have become more fragile in other ways. Popenoe (1988, pp. 310-313) enumerates changes in the "social ecology of child-rearing" that have placed children in increasingly dire circumstances. He cites several examples of this erosion:
Researchers have documented a similar erosion in the social ecology of families while caring for older, chronically disabled parents, grandparents, and spouses. Caregivers experience increasing conflicts between the demands of employment and the demands of caring for the elderly at home. High rates of mobility have created great distances between adult children and their elder parents who require home-based, long-term care. Although research consistently shows that families still provide most of the long-term care, they do so under pressures that have been intensified by the decline of the community around families. Political and Economic Dimensions of Community Decline The decline of the community around families has led federal, state, and local agencies to create new formal service systems. Although these formal systems have created many needed programs, their design has contributed in many respects to the weakening of community. As mentioned above, the centralization and age segregation of schools has contributed to the decline of community in neighborhoods. The highly fragmented delivery systems in child welfare, mental health, child care, and other human services arenas force families with multiple needs to contend with many sets of regulations, agencies, and eligibility criteria. While in a strong community a family would find a continuity of values from school to church to neighborhood, in communities weakened by fragmented service systems, families are more likely to find discontinuity from one program to the next. In a strong community, a family would be served by a particular institution because it is a member of the community, while in a formal service system, a family is more likely to be defined by its particular problem or deficit and how that deficit triggers eligibility for a service. As will be related next, some system reforms are attempting to change this narrow view of eligibility. Yet, many challenges remain along the route to renewing community around families through system reform. The centralization and fragmentation in public service systems have been accompanied by similar patterns in the organization and location of businesses. Neighborhood shops in many localities have gone the way of neighborhood schools: from small-scale organizations within walking distances and nested within residential districts to large, distant places accessible by automobile and isolated from residential districts. The problem has become more acute for inner-city neighborhoods, since many of the neighborhood businesses that catered to families left the cities altogether, locating in suburban malls, industrial parks, commercial parks, and other business districts. The flight of businesses from older cities has contributed to the racial and income segregation of cities and suburbs. Not only did the white middle-class families leave cities for the expanding economic opportunities in the suburbs, many African-American, middle-class families followed after housing discrimination was made unlawful by the Fair Housing Act (Wilson, 1987). Although the legislation affirmed essential rights for racial minorities, it also helped to isolate the poorest minority families in cities they could not afford to leave. Urban Design and Community DiminishmentThe suburban enclaves that have grown rapidly since the 1 950s have been designed to isolate and segregate poor families from middle-class families and families in general from nonresidential activities. Many urban design experts now agree that single-use residential zoning, which has dominated planning efforts, created serious impediments to establishing community for suburban families (Katz, 1993; Marcus and Sarkissan, 1986). Louv writes movingly about the evolution of recent development patterns. He refers to the "clusters and nodes" of development outside cities that must be consciously designed to be "pro-family" and "pro-child" (Louv, 1990, p. 322): As society deconcentrates into such nodes and clusters beyond traditional cities and towns, we need to recognize this movement and plan pro-child and pro-child family hubs within it. Many now lack centers—hearts, connective points. How can children or parents feel at home in places without identifiable meeting places? The nature and quality of this kind of development (which in rural areas is known as "buckshot" urbanization) leave both parents and children with a fragmented sense of place. Ultimately we need to rethink this evolving urban form, reconsider how to reorganize it around community. One of the amenities missing from many housing developments is walkability—the degree to which a resident can reach by foot—travel shops, parks, workplaces, schools, homes of neighbors, and other destinations important to daily life. Walkability facilitates interactions among neighbors as they physically cross paths at these various points of mutual interest. Vast developments have been built during the past thirty years that offer little in the way of walkability. Instead, by creating ample off-street parking and multiple garages per home, they are designed to facilitate automobile travel. Switching from foot-travel to automobile on a mass basis has undercut many of the opportunities for social interaction that establish community. Not only is automobile travel more impersonal than walking, the more centralized destinations—large malls, regional parks—are more impersonal as well. The familiar clientele commonly found at a neighborhood business are not as visible at a regional shopping mall. A father who takes a child to a regional park to which he must drive 5 to 10 miles is not likely to build the friendship network with other fathers that he might at a closer neighborhood park. Sadly, the older neighborhoods in cities that are better designed for community are deteriorating physically as a result of the suffering city economies. The Recent Revival of Community Building as a Framework for Policy Development and Program Design In recent years, public interest in revitalizing communities has grown. At one level, this trend is represented by the "communitarian movement" that focuses on reintroducing moral and contextual frameworks into the development of policies. At another level, this direction can be seen in the efforts in localities to coordinate traditionally separate services and programs into mutually reinforcing strategies that can rebuild communities. The CommunitariansOne reflection of this surge is the "communitarian" movement sparked at the national level by Amitai Etzioni, the renowned sociologist. The communitarians are building a national network of supporters (the "Communitarian Network"); publishing a journal, The Responsive Community; holding periodic "teach-ins" to broaden the public conversation about community; and sponsoring other publications and events to press their cause. Much of the movement's philosophy is described eloquently in Etzioni's recent book, The Spirit of Community (1993). Etzioni argues that communitarianism is an "environmental movement" in that it attempts to embed issues that have been defined too often with an emphasis on individual rights in the context of moral responsibilities This contextual approach to issues is reflected in his discussion of the "communitarian family" (Etzioni, 1993, p. 54): Making a child is a moral act. Obviously it obligates the parents to the child. But it also obligates the parents to the community. We must all live with the consequences of children who are not brought up properly, whether bad economic conditions or self centered parents are to blame. Juvenile delinquents do more than break their parents' hearts, and drug abusers do more than give their parents grief. They mug the elderly, hold up stores and gas stations, and prey on innocent children returning from school. They grow up to be useless, or worse, as employees, and they can drain taxpayers' resources and patience In contrast, well-brought-up children are more than a joy to their families; they are (oddly, it is necessary to reiterate this) a foundation of proud and successful communities, those whose future is promising. Therefore, parents have a moral responsibility to the community to invest themselves in the proper upbringing of their children, and communities—to enable parents to so dedicate themselves. The Communitarian Network, the name for the loosely organized supporters of communitarianism, has issued a position statement pertaining to the family. As reported in the National Civic Review, communitarian policy positions toward family issues would emerge from the following perspectives (Elshtain et al., 1993):
These statements of principle are followed by a number of policy recommendations including, among others, support of parental leave child allowances, increased child support, lessening the ease of obtaining a divorce, welfare reform, morally grounded sex education, and enforcement of the 1990 National Children's Television Act. Community Building InitiativesThe growth of the communitarian movement has coincided with a resurgence of comprehensive initiatives aimed at strengthening communities at their deeper civic, moral, and social infrastructure. Such efforts aim explicitly to mix community development, economic development, and human service strategies into holistic, collaborative projects. They also go to considerable lengths to help residents and citizens in general to participate collectively in formulating plans and carrying them out. Some efforts have been triggered by foundations, such as The Pew Partnership for Civic Change, administered by The Pew Charitable Trusts (Morse, 1993) and the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "New Futures" projects. The Ford Foundation's Neighborhood and Family Initiative is attempting to build local institutional collaboratives around projects that stimulate community development, economic development, and family development simultaneously (Chaskin, 1992). The Chicago Community Trust is pursuing similar objectives through projects in Chicago neighborhoods (Wynn and Richman,1992). Other organizations have taken an increasingly supportive stance toward community building efforts. The National Civic League has promoted the building up of "civic infrastructure" in many localities. League President John Parr defines civic infrastructures as "the informal and formal processes through which communities make decisions and solve problems" (Parr, 1993, p. 93). The League uses its National Civic Index, Healthy Communities projects, and other projects to strengthen collaborative decision making m localities. The National League of Cities (NLC) has conducted a "Children and Families in Cities" project for several years. Its aim is to raise municipal of officials' awareness and knowledge of opportunities that local governments could use to strengthen families. Guided by Mayor Donald Fraser of Minneapolis, NLC issued Families and Communities: The 1992 Futures Report. Many principles and program examples were outlined in the project's agenda (Barnes and Van Der Meere, 1992; National League of Cities, 1992). Examples show how any local government agency, from education to public works, can strive to strengthen families. According to NLC, strengthening families through community collaborations entails a shift from a "deficit" model that perpetuates family failures to a "capacity" model that builds on family strengths. Whereas the deficit model is crisis-oriented, defines family "solely by structure" (two-parent vs. one-parent and other structural categories usually tied to eligibility criteria), and views families "in isolation," the capacity model stresses prevention, sees family and community as interdependent, and defines family primarily by functions. Functions are similar to capacities; they are what strong families can create and contribute to the community. At a recent national conference, both the National Civic League and the National League of Cities hosted forums on local collaborative projects that are putting some of these principles into place. The projects are noteworthy for the ways in which they combine highly diverse sources of funds into very comprehensive community development projects that, like the Neighborhood Family Initiative mentioned above, attack community decline on many fronts at once: social, economic, and physical. Such projects include Baltimore's Sandtown initiative (Henderson, 1993; Pierce, 1993), Newark's New Community Corporation (Lewis, 1993), and the comprehensive project in Atlanta sparked by former President Jimmy Carter (Giles, 1993). Many of these community-building projects have been influenced by the work of McKnight and his colleagues at Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. McKnight has criticized conventional human service systems for emphasizing the deficits of poor communities rather than their capacities (1977, 1987). Emphasizing deficits and needs rather than capacities and assets leads residents into client roles that only further disempower them. It also exacerbates the tendency of planners and the middle class in general to see residents of poorer neighborhoods only in terms of their weaknesses. However, as explained by McKnight and Kretzman, planning can be done so that the assets present in even the most distressed communities are inventoried and built upon (McKnight and Kretzman, 1990, p. 3): The process of identifying capacities and assets, both individual and organizational, is the first step on the path toward community regeneration. Once this new "map" has replaced the one containing needs and deficiencies, the regenerating community can begin to assemble its assets and capacities into new combinations, new structures of opportunity, new sources of income and control, and new possibilities for production. Many community development groups have utilized the "capacity inventory" made available by McKnight and his colleagues. The focus on community capacities logically leads to the mixing of physical and social resources referred to earlier. Combining "hard" programs—physical development and economic development—with so-called "soft" programs—human services and education—is now increasingly touted as the approach necessary to strengthen communities for families. The National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED) argues, for instance, that community development corporations (CDC) must become more adept at using human services as tools of economic development. As NCCED points out, human services have traditionally been implemented without linkage to economic development projects (NCCED, 1991, p. 20): Much progress has been made in our understanding of the interrelation between physical and human capital-such as between quality parks, educational institutions, recreation and public safety, and employee satisfaction and plant retention. But, for the most part, human services are perceived as separate and apart from development efforts and the economy—as care and maintenance activities, not economic activity. Moreover, by emphasizing social transfers between various groups of the middle class, government has promoted custodial care for previously productive individuals, while ignoring those with the potential to become fully functioning citizens. NCCED recommends creating "development-oriented" services, which would mean linking the current human services for families and dependents more productively to economic development strategies. The development-oriented services model promoted by NCCED would have five elements (NCCED, 1991, p. 22):
Examples of CDCs that have pioneered this blending of human services and economic development include the New Community Corporation in Newark, New Jersey; Coastal Enterprises, Inc., in Wiscasset, Maine; Bethel New Life in Chicago, Illinois; Chicanos Port La Causa in Phoenix, Arizona; and the Neighborhood Institute in Chicago, Illinois. The NCCED report is particularly germane to our topic because it concludes with a review of state trends in human services policy development that can create favorable opportunities for CDCs and the above-mentioned development-oriented services. Many of these trends were referred to in section I: preventive approaches, working with local, informal associations, decategorizing programs, and others. NCCED concludes that states are becoming increasingly critical resources for community building. Families as Agents of Community Building While it is certainly refreshing for community development advocates to again view "community" as an "in" term in policy development, the community-oriented approaches to helping families reflect the same limitations of the policies reviewed in section I. Because they emphasize family support more than family empowerment, they tend to see the community-and-family relationship as a unidirectional relationship—from community to family. They emphasize what communities can do to nurture families, create more family-friendly neighborhoods, make housing more affordable for more families, and strengthen the moral environment for marital commitments and responsible parenting. Yet, while families need to be supported by communities, families also must be enlisted as agents of community building. This latter view is not as widely reflected in policies. Communities need to be built not just for families, but by families (of course, not by families only; Kordesh, 1991). What families need are new institutions through which they can exercise their productive capacities in ways that contribute to the revitalization of community. It is in the family that a child can first experience the attachment to place that is so critical to a strong community. It is in the family that a child can first experience the sense of interconnectedness, common mission, and shared history. Popenoe (1988, pp. 310-313) articulates this connection between family and community in terms of the family's relationship to civil society. A symbiotic relationship exists between the family and civil society. The family in an unfriendly surrounding culture is precarious; the stresses can be overwhelming. And civil societies depend on families to inculcate those civic values—honesty, trust, self-sacrifice, personal responsibility—by which they thrive. In this sense, families can be thought of as "seedbeds of civic virtue." Unfortunately, the institutional gap between families and public life in most localities prevents families from contributing to community building. Family empowerment associations are needed to fill this gap. Policies are needed to aid their formation. Index Preface
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