Core Principles of Community Building

in community stories

Excerpts 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.

Anne C. Kubisch

Community building—the process of strengthening the ability of neighborhood residents, organizations, and institutions to foster and sustain neighborhood change, both individually and collectively—is vital to the work of Comprehensive Community Initiatives and many other community-change efforts. The belief that community residents can be agents of change, rather than just beneficiaries or clients, is probably the quality that most distinguishes community building from traditional programs and activities.

Practitioners believe that community building is a democratic process and that the people who are most affected by what happens in a community have the right to be included in discussions and decisions about what and how things should be done. This dimension of the work often is what truly motivates leaders, staff, and residents as they carry out their daily activities. It underscores the values of equity, self-determination, social justice, and respect for diversity that they believe are fundamental to healthy communities.

Prudence Brown

Prudence Brown

The community-building principle also recognizes that strong communities are built on the strengths of their residents and the relationships among them. The isolation of poor neighborhoods can undermine residents’ emotional, psychological, and social supports and sap the energy and the will they need to produce changes. Community building tries to weave or repair the social fabric of a neighborhood by expanding and strengthening informal ties among residents. It also aims to link community members with supportive individuals, organizations, and resources outside the neighborhood.

Community building, as the name suggests, is an ongoing process. In the words of one funder, “Is there such a thing as a ‘built’ community? I don’t think so. There’s always room for improvement.” The goal is to put in place the will, resources, and capacity needed to sustain local improvement beyond the life of an initiative.

MODELS FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING

Robert Chaskin

Although successful Community Development Corporations and other community-based organizations began putting the philosophy into practice well before it went by the name “community building,” CCIs played a pivotal role in placing the principle front and center, backing it with financial and technical resources, finding ways to implement it, and attempting to measure it. Community building’s position within recent community-change initiatives spans the spectrum from being a means to an end to being the end itself.

Community building as a means to an end

Some CCIs undertake community building as a means for reaching or enhancing programmatic goals (e.g., increasing employment, building better housing, improving health outcomes). From the perspective of these practitioners, community building is one of many instruments for change—something that occurs in the service of the initiative. According to one CCI director, “Community building must be done around real projects designed to revitalize the neighborhood in response to the needs and issues articulated by the community. It’s not just a matter of holding meetings. It must be outcomes oriented … it must be intertwined with programs. It’s not an approach by itself: it feeds on and is fed by outcome-oriented projects”.

Advocates of this view are sometimes impatient with the process oriented, “touchy-feely” community builders who, they believe, are lax about linking the work to outcomes. As a representative from one neighborhood-based employment effort explained, “If we find out that the neighborhood residents didn’t get jobs, we will not have succeeded. If we find out that they increased their self-esteem but didn’t get jobs, we just won’t accept that.”

Community building as an end in itself

Other practitioners believe that community building is an end in itself, a goal to pursue. Their initiatives use community building to drive all strategic decisions, and they assume that community-building outcomes—resident leadership, social capital, and neighborhood empowerment—are both valuable in their own right and essential for producing other types of change. People who subscribe to this view would argue that a community improvement effort that builds housing or increases employment but does not engage or empower residents is not successful.

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Improve the Community, Deter the Criminal

in community stories

Crime is a serious and costly social problem that touches every neighborhood in this country. The knowledge base for developing effective neighborhood crime prevention initiatives has expanded significantly in recent years. When targeting these processes, certain interventions have been fairly successful in reducing the prevalence of crime in specific areas. Whether this knowledge can be used to produce sustained reductions in neighborhood crime rates is an important social policy question.

Since the mid-1960s, the United States has been embroiled in a war against crime, and has sought to control crime though the traditional responses of deterrence, incapacitation, and (occasionally) rehabilitation. The results of this law-enforcement approach are apparent. Expanded criminal codes and enforcement have produced huge jail and prison populations, disproportionately persons of color. While many policymakers have sought to justify these actions by citing reductions in crime rates, regardless of the merits of this argument (which are debatable), the financial and human costs of these policies are enormous and underestimated.

Although the criminal justice system is a necessary component of neighborhood crime prevention, it is not sufficient and can easily be overused. Clearly, the criminal justice system, as currently structured, is extremely limited in its capacity to prevent neighborhood crime. Hence, the best bet for promoting safe and healthy neighborhoods is to achieve broad understanding of the causes and impacts of violence and work to develop a broad array of preventive responses.

One important insight to emerge from scientific inquiry into neighborhoods in the past few decades is that problem behaviors tend to cluster in geographic areas and within individuals and families. Consequently, these behaviors tend to reinforce one another. Delinquency, violence, dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, and substance abuse often co-vary. As a result, new models are emerging for improving neighborhood safety and health, beginning with the premise that organizing around broad goals at the neighborhood level will result in improved quality of life for local residents. Inherent in these new models is the belief that traditional approaches to improving social conditions are not effective at the neighborhood level and that communities and regions play a much larger role in producing real change. These new models are diverse, but mutually supportive.

  • Individual and family interventions are now giving greater attention to early intervention in the life cycle.
  • Community models now recognize the need for achieving justice through harm reduction and offender reintegration rather than through isolation and retribution.
  • Restorative and community justice models are enticing because they offer justice by linking community and agency resources through a process that may strengthen collective efficacy at the neighborhood level.
  • Technology models are seeking to empower communities with web-based information networks, while pursuing resources to close the “digital divide.”
  • Macrolevel interventions are needed to regulate the economic and government forces that have historically resulted in community decline and disinvestment and provide new opportunities that can discourage crime.

Despite gaps in knowledge, progress has been made in designing successful neighborhood crime prevention initiatives. The recent developments in neighborhood-based programming have ignited hope—a hope that crime-ridden neighborhoods can become safe and healthy places for residents to raise children and achieve a reasonable quality of life. Comprehensive community programs have shown some success and are being replicated in many locations. However, there is much more we need to understand and much more we need to do. To take the lead from Penelope Tricket and her colleagues, today’s residents deserve the best we can offer with our current knowledge; tomorrow’s deserve better.

from Community Change: Theories, Practice, and Evidence (pdf). Amie M. Schuck and Dennis P. Rosenbaum. Edited by Karen Fulbright-Anderson and Patricia Auspos. The Aspen Institute.

The Art of Community

in community stories

Excerpts from Chapter 1 of The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon. Note from the author: When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales.

But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them. To make this happen O’Reilly needed to be on board to allow the book to be freely copied and shared, in an era in which these very freedoms threaten the publishing world.

But they came through. Thanks to the incredible support of Andy Oram, my founding editor for the book, O’Reilly were hugely supportive of the project and our desire to break down these barriers.

Today I am pleased to announce the general availability of The Art Of Community under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

Main points

A sense of belonging is what keeps people in communities. This belonging is the goal of community building. The hallmark of a strong community is when its members feel that they belong.

Belonging is our goal. It is that nine-letter word that you should write out in large letters and stick on your office wall. It is that word that should be at the forefront of your inspiration behind building strong community. If there is no belonging, there is no community.

Belonging is the measure of a strong social economy. This economy’s currency is not the money that you find in your wallet or down the back of your couch, but is social capital.

The first known use of the term “social capital” (referred to in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community [Simon & Schuster]) was by L. J. Hanifan, a school supervisor in rural Virginia. Hanifan described social capital as “those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit….”

For an economy and community to be successful, the participants need to believe in it. If no one believes in the community that brings them together, it fails.

For an economy to work, every participant needs to believe in the economy. Belief is a critical component in how any group of people or animals functions. This can be belief in God, belief in values, or belief in a new future. Whatever the core belief is, the economy and the community can be successful only if everyone has faith in it.

Like any other economy, a social economy is a collection of processes that describe how something works and is shared between those who participate.

An economy is a set of shared concepts and processes that grow and change in an effort to generate a form of capital. In a financial economy, participants put goods and services on the market to generate financial capital. The processes and techniques they use include measuring sales, strategic marketing, enabling ease of access, and so forth. A social economy is the same thing—but we are the product, and the capital is respect and trust. The processes and techniques here are different—open communications mediums, easy access to tools, etc.—but the basic principles are the same.

These processes, and the generation of social capital, which in turn generates belonging, needs to be effectively communicated.

An economy is like a flowing river: it never stops, and the flow is critical to its success. Economies never stand still. Every day they change, adjusting to stimuli in the world that affects them. At the heart of how this movement works is communication.

The Basis of Communication

Peter Block, a consultant on learning, makes an important foundational observation about communication in a social economy: “community is fundamentally an interdependent human system given form by the conversation it holds with itself.” When I first heard that quote, I realized that the mechanism behind communication in a community is stories.

Stories are a medium in which we keep the river flowing. They are the vessels in which we not only express ideas (“I was taking the subway to work one day, and I saw this lady on there reading the paper, and it made me think xyz”), but also how we learn from past experiences (“There was one time when I saw David do xyz and I knew I had to adjust how I myself handle those situations in the future”). Furthermore, when the characters in the stories are people in a community, the stories are self-referencing and give the community a sense of reporting. Communities really feel like communities when there is a news wire, be it formalized or through the grapevine.

Not all stories are cut from the same cloth, though. Communities tend to exchange two very different kinds of story: tales and fables.

Tales are told for entertainment value and to share experiences. They are individual units of experience that are shared between people, and their primary value is in communicating a given person’s experience and adding to the listener’s repertoire of stories and experiences.

Fables are different. Fables are stories designed to illustrate an underlying message. The vast majority of us are exposed to fables as children, and these stories are passed down from generation to generation, each one extolling a moral message to the youth of the day.

To be continued.

Join the Art of Community Comedy Photo Competiton

Join the Art of Community Comedy Photo Competiton

This book is free, but you should buy it if you could. From the author: While the book is ready to download right now, the book is available to buy in print, on Kindle, and other electronic book formats and I would like to encourage you to buy a printed copy of the book for a few reasons: Firstly, buying a copy sends a tremendous message to O’Reilly that they should continue to publish books (a) about community and (b) under a Creative Commons license. Secondly, it will encourage O’Reilly to invest in a second edition of the book down the line, which will in turn mean that communities around the world will have a refreshed and updated edition that is available to them. Thirdly, aside from the voting-with-your-feet side of things, it is just a really nice book to own in print. It is really well made, looks stunning and feels great to curl up with in a coffee shop or on the couch.

More from The Art of Community

Loving Thy Neighbor

in community stories

via Loving Thy Neighbor. By Sam Fulwood III, Center for American Progress. As a fresh immigration reform debate gears up in Washington, D.C., a wide range of faith groups are showing a new, unexpected, and grassroots-led social activism that’s rooted in theological and moral ground. While loud and shrill anti-immigrant voices dominate much of the media attention regarding immigrants and especially the undocumented, faith community activists are caring and praying in the shadows of public attention.

These groups have worked for many years and across the country on immigration issues and as strong advocates for undocumented workers and their families. Their efforts include creating citizenship projects, offering educational and support services, fighting discrimination and exploitation, bridging gaps between immigrant and nonimmigrant communities, providing sanctuary for immigrant families, supporting comprehensive legislative reform, and more.

Hundreds of diverse faith communities have been active independently and within larger organizations. Mainline Protestant denominations, Catholic parishes, Jewish congregations, and others, along with groups such as PICO, the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, Sojourners, Catholic Social Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Families United, and Gamaliel have stood up and spoken out on behalf of immigrants and their families.

But lately, these efforts are gaining new energy and spreading around the country as people of faith are championing the cause of immigration reform. This is an important development because it heralds a sweeping grassroots movement that will support political leaders in Washington who join their cause.

The ancient scriptures describe the stories of immigrants—people cast out of their native land who wander in the world’s wilderness and seek refuge in foreign places. It’s an epic saga, filled with struggle and conflict, despair and deliverance. Little wonder that present-day people of faith find parallels in the lives of immigrants in this country.

Of course, the travails of people fleeing poverty-stricken Latin America or the war-ravaged Middle East to come to the United States are very different from the patriarchs’ journey to Egypt in search of food or the exile of Israelites after their homeland fell to Assyria and Judea fell to Babylon. Or are they?

The specific details may vary, but the plight of an immigrant is as old as humanity. From biblical antiquity to the 21st century, the response of people of faith remains constant, following the admonition to ease the burdens of strangers in their midst.

This report is a collection of present-day immigrant stories. Unlike the more familiar narrative of oppression in a foreign land, these are stories of faith in the flesh, of people filled with the conviction of their religious beliefs and pushed to act in defense of needy neighbors in their community.

The report also intends to be an antidote to the mistaken belief that ordinary people of faith are not involved in political advocacy or shy from pressing their influence in national debates and policies affecting immigrants. As these stories demonstrate, many efforts sprang up at the grassroots, independent of each other and often without awareness that anyone or any other group was concerned about this issue. People of faith pitched in to help fellow humans whose lives seemed very different from their own, and they were spurred on by a sense of moral outrage at the detentions of undocumented immigrants in their communities.

Several of these stories haven’t been widely told and therefore aren’t a part of the media chatter in the debate over immigration reform. This must change if comprehensive immigration reform is to earn broad and popular support. Faith-based activism must become part of the public debate.

How to create a green neighborhood group

in community stories

By Siel Ju

The Green Committee’s now a successful community group, but efforts to green Mar Vista didn’t always run so smoothly. The first year was rocky for the Green Committee. Formed back in early 2008, the three to five people on the committee, according to Sherri, had lots of well-intended intended ideas, but “no handle on where to start.” The group tried to connect the community through an educational booth with a speaker at the farmers’ market, but “it quickly became apparent that people weren’t going to make an appointment [to sit and listen to a speaker] on a Sunday at the farmers’ market,” Sherri says. “Nothing was really happening.”

That’s when the Green Committee decided to plan an event to introduce the neighborhood to the group. So in Fall 2008, the Green Committee took over the MVCC’s open community meeting, bringing in speakers to talk about everything from composting to solar power. “The turnout was unbelievable,” Sherri says. “And it gave people the chance to find out that there were so many like-minded people in the community.”

That event served as a wakeup call of sorts, opening the way for a big Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase (above are the showcase participants) in April this year, which let 1,000+ people take tours of 44 local lawns and gardens turned into drought-resistant or edible landscapes. Then came the Water Use Expo in July, featuring L.A. Councilmember Bill Rosendahl and actorvist Ed Begley, Jr.

All this greening work’s also gotten the Mar Vista community some nice eco-bonuses from the city, too. After all, city councilmembers are more likely to select a location where they know people will get behind the programs. “They knew we’d do a lot to make it happen,” Sherri says, pointing out Mar Vista’s not only a pilot area for the L.A. rainwater harvesting program — but also on the list for a pilot green street program.

Now the group’s come full circle. The farmers market booth gets steady traffic all day, with the experts and speakers talking one-on-one with residents about how they can apply eco-changes to their individual lives.

Was the Mar Vista community simply more green than other communities to begin with, thus making the Green Committee’s work easy? “I don’t think it’s that Mar Vista has more eco-friendly people than anywhere else,” says Sherri. “We’ve just found this channel to find each other.”

Want your neighborhood to have a Green Committee? All it takes is a few people, Sherri says. “It really is neighbor-to-neighbor. Find three or four people who are like minded, then approach the city council or neighborhood association.” Then let your neighbors know the new green group exists. “Hijack something that happens anyway and give it a green flavor,” Sherri advises.

And rest assured that it won’t always be the three or four of you pulling all the weight. “One important key to our success is that this is such a hands on community, with so many people willing to volunteer and contribute,” Sherri says. When we put on events, it truly seems effortless because so many people pitch in!”

excerpted from  How to create a green neighborhood group | MNN – Mother Nature Network.