Strengthening the Capacities and Connections of Community Residents

Highlights from Voices From the Field II: Reflections on Comprehensive Community Change, by Anne C. Kubisch, Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, Robert Chaskin, Karen Fulbright-Anderson, and Ralph Hamilton. Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute.

Community capacity: the interaction of human capital, organizational resources, and social capital existing within a given community that can be leveraged to solve collective problems and improve or maintain the well-being of that community. It may operate through informal social processes and/or organized efforts by individuals, organizations and social networks. (Chaskin, Brown, Venkatesh & Vidal, 2001).

The key features of communities with capacity are a sense of community among residents, a commitment by residents to organize and act to improve the community, an ability to act to solve problems, and access to resources within and beyond the community.

Because residents are the core of a community’s assets, they represent the first level in the ecology of community change. As both agents and beneficiaries of community change, they can play a central role in shaping, implementing, and sustaining the change agenda. In many low-income communities, however, residents lack opportunities and support for those roles. Efforts by recent community-change ventures to increase residents’ capacity involve developing them as leaders, creating social connections, and organizing people to participate in change.

Developing Leaders

Our definition and discussion of leadership development draws heavily from a recent publication on community capacity (Chaskin, Brown,Venkatesh & Vidal, 2001), which describes the following characteristics: [Leadership development] attempts to engage the participation and commitment of current and potential leaders, provide them with opportunities for building skills, connect them to new information and resources, enlarge their perspectives on their community and how it might change, and help them create new relationships.

Methods range from formal training programs, which convey information or develop particular skills, to on-the-job training in which participants become members of boards or planning teams, serve in apprenticeships or co-staffing positions, and receive coaching or other training that prepares them to assume new roles. These approaches can be used to cultivate individual leaders or cadres of individuals who can participate in any stage of the community-change process: developing the overall vision, creating the plan for change, performing activities to implement the plan, tracking progress, and spreading the news about results.

It is essential to examine the community’s existing leadership structures—both informal and formal—carefully.

Their dynamics and subtleties are hard for outsiders to grasp easily. Without deep knowledge of the local context, it can be difficult to identify and work with local leaders. Often, however, community building initiatives select residents to participate on governance boards or in leadership training programs without knowing whether they are actually connected to appropriate constituencies or whether other neighborhood stakeholders will view them as legitimate.

Moreover, the relative strengths and weaknesses of old and new leaders present both assets and challenges. Existing leaders can bring credibility, experience, and extensive relationship networks to the table, but they also may suspect the motives and abilities of new leaders and jealously guard their “turf.”New leaders contribute fresh ideas and energy and can increase the total number of leaders involved, but their skills may take time and resources to develop. Community change efforts that do not recognize these dynamics risk creating conflict, failing to maximize the strengths of local leaders, and losing residents’ willingness to make genuine investments in the initiative.

Participation in an initiative by local leaders does not always guarantee that neighborhood views receive respect.

Many of the technical skills required to improve housing, economic opportunities, and other program areas do not exist in communities depleted by long-term disinvestment. But when outside experts come in to help, residents sometimes feel that their own leadership skills have been discounted.

Overwhelmed by professional service providers or community development practitioners, residents can fall silent and allow others to make the decisions. Successful community building assumes that the outside expert’s role is to share knowledge so that good decisions are made, but not to make the decisions.

Simply giving residents leadership roles, without training or follow-up, does not necessarily produce effective or powerful leaders.

According to several initiative directors, residents need extra support to help them stay at the table effectively: “They need the pre-meeting meeting that helps them develop their strategies, and then they need the post-meeting meetings to help them debrief and compare perspectives.”

One way to develop local leaders is to give residents jobs as staff or board members. Often, however, the residents placed in those positions serve only as outreach workers or in roles for which they are not initially qualified. They may not receive the training or opportunities they need to develop competent leadership skills or to move up within the organization.

Formal training for local leaders—on how to run meetings or monitor agency spending, for example—is difficult to do well, however. Classes are an efficient way to share information and skills, but they can seem abstract, leaving residents feeling lost, and they often fail to provide adequate follow-up.

Leadership development appears to be more successful when it comes as part of the process of addressing goals. As one technical assistance provider explained, “Rather than doing board training about board-staff relations, we did it around the hiring of an executive director, which was the task of the moment. Or we gave them financial training when we needed to build a budget.”

The idea of “becoming leaders through the work” resonates with many residents; it is an approach that builds confidence and generates positive relationships among people who share a common goal. However, it is challenging to implement because it requires professional staff to consider everything on two levels: how to get the task done and how to exploit the task’s teaching potential.

Some organizations have made serious commitments to developing resident leaders on the job, even if it means slowing down the pace of production, with an eye toward ultimately decreasing reliance on people from outside the community. One organization, for example, raised funds so that residents on staff could get the education they needed to take over leadership responsibilities from the non-resident professional staff; now, 60 of 75 staff are lifetime neighborhood residents.

Leadership development is an ongoing, intentional process.

The local leadership base rarely stays stable over time. Individuals burn out, move into positions of higher authority, or leave the community, creating a constant pressure to replenish the leadership base. It takes continuous investment and commitment to make sure that new leaders develop and find roles to fill, even if existing leaders fail to step aside.

Coming up:

Creating social connections
Mobilizing people to participate in community change

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