Neighborhood-based community building handbooks recommended by Jim Diers

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

“Few people in this country know as much about community building as Jim Diers,” said  Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces (PPS). From 1988 to 2002, Jim led Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods which is “widely known as the most innovative effort in the U.S. to empower local residents” (John P. Kretzmann, Co-director or the Asset-Based Community Development Institute).

Jim’s been dragged all over the world by people and orgs keen to learn from his real-world experience as a community builder. He’s currently on a tour through Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, and the US. (It’s not really a book tour, but a lot of the discussions revolve around the ideas and practices detailed in his must-read book Neighbor Power.) Yet he somehow found time to answer my request.

In my own experience as a community organizer, I’ve found that it’s so much easier to get things moving when people don’t have to first invent the wheel. So I like workbooks. Our Blocks recently featured one workbook,which I thought was the best I’d seen so far. I asked Jim if others came to mind. He said he’d give it more thought when he had more time, but off the top of his head:

  1. The Organizer’s Workbook, published by the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center -  a roadmap to discovering, organizing and engaging your neighborhood. (This is the workbook we’d previously featured, as noted above. Incidentally, I corresponded this week with INRC Executive Director Anne-Marie Taylor, who said she’d “love to hear how folks outside of Indianapolis are utilizing this Workbook”.)
  2. The Great Neighborhood Book, by Jay Walljasper, published by PPS. (In the Great Minds Think Alike category, this book was also recommended to us by UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz, Development Partner at the Community Tool Box.)

Not a workbook, but something Jim brought up in relation to my plans to do community-building work in the Philippines: From Clients to Citizens – Deepening the Practice of Asset-Based and Citizen-Led Development (pdf) – Conversations from the ABCD Forum, July 8 – 10, 2009. Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Edited by Alison Mathie and Deborah Puntenney. December 2009. The Coady International Institute published this under a CC-ANSA license, very nice of them.

Thanks for your recommendations Jim.

Other recent articles on Jim Diers by friends of Our Blocks: Jim Diers on citizen action by Kevin Harris at Neighborhoods; Getting back to Government Is Us at Socialreporter (which includes a beer-powered interview by David Wilcox). You can also find Jim’s talks on The Youtubes, three of which (so far) we’ve added to our Videos collection. Not recent but still fresh, this hour-long conversation on KUOW (note: turns out there’s a difference between mating calls and meeting calls).

Meriden neighborhood associations thrive

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

When the Action 13 neighborhood association held a meeting Thursday to provide information for residents looking to start local block watch programs, a crowd of 30 people came out to join the discussion.

Earlier this month, nearly 50 people attended the Dutch Hill association meeting to discuss quality-of-life issues and the largest annual event for the associations, the National Night Out program held at City Park in August, has drawn 3,000 people for two consecutive years.

Neighborhood associations in Meriden have been thriving in recent years, with participation increasing steadily since 2006 and groups, including West Siders, Action 13, City Park and Dutch Hill, have seen increasing numbers of regular attendees at their meetings.

Presidents of the local associations said a shift from crime to quality-of-life issues, such as keeping up good appearances and preventing kids from throwing parties on dead-end streets, focusing on children and a strong partnership with the Meriden Police Department and the police Neighborhood Initiatives Unit have led to the resurgence of these neighborhood associations. As they move toward the future, they said these factors will play a key role in the continued success of these associations.

Officer Fred Rivera, who works on patrol in both the Action 13 and West Sider neighborhoods, said it wasn’t always this way. Just a few years ago, many of the associations were struggling to maintain any regular membership.

“When I first came on to join the department seven years ago, there really weren’t many members and most of these groups weren’t even meeting regularly,” Rivera said. “Now every meeting you come to, neighbors are out and want to get involved.

Johnathon Henninger / Record-Journal Dave Swedock, president of the Council of Neighborhood, talks at a gathering at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Meriden Thursday night. Recent vandalism was discussed.

Johnathon Henninger / Record-Journal Dave Swedock, president of the Council of Neighborhood, talks at a gathering at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Meriden Thursday night. Recent vandalism was discussed.

Declines in participation

Standing on stage during the 2009 National Night Out event, overlooking a crowd that included nearly 3,000 people and more than 60 vendors from organizations across the community, Meriden Council of Neighborhoods president David Swedock couldn’t help but smile. Just five years ago, Swedock could only dream about having that sort of participation at any community event. By the summer of 2004, membership in neighborhood associations was so low that many of the neighborhoods did not host monthly meetings, had no real leadership and in some cases were in danger of going defunct.

Swedock said there were several reasons for the disconnect, but the toughest challenge was finding interested members when police were no longer involved. “Our main problem was the disbanding of the community policing unit in 2001,” Swedock said. “When the officers were no longer involved, it changed the way these associations were able to operate. Without police, these groups are nothing more than a social network.”

What had allowed the associations to thrive was the direct involvement of officers who were dedicated to their neighborhood communities, Swedock said. When the community policing division was cut in 2001, Swedock said that all nearly came to a screeching halt, but several dedicated officers helped keep the associations on life support, explained Swedock. Police officers, including Otero, Timothy Topulous and Michael Zakrzewski volunteered their own time to attend meetings and prevent the neighborhood associations from dying off completely.

The resurgence

When current Police Chief Jeffry Cossette took over, one of his first moves as chief was to work with union members and re-establish the community policing efforts with the new Neighborhood Initiatives Unit. With a strong line of communication re-established between the Police Department and local residents, the department was able to address the petty crimes and nuisances that mattered most to residents.

Meanwhile a move by several associations in 2006 and 2007 to address quality-of-life issues and not just crime has helped foster participation at regular meetings once again. Proactive functions and events help provide positive entertainment for today’s youth and sends a strong message to the community that there is a commitment to happy, healthy living. The associations are also giving informative presentations that can teach residents to protect themselves and their property or can introduce neighbors to the political candidates in their district, said Lisa DeDominicis, president of Action 13.

As associations move to the future, City Park association president Ethel McQuiller said attracting regular participants remains a top priority and said participation is critical in allowing these types of organizations to host annual events. In areas such as Lewis Avenue, associations have also combined efforts to deal with lower participation often triggered by resident turnover when short-term renters move out. By pairing with the Kensington area and Grove Street associations, Swedock said the Lewis Avenue association has maintained active participation.

All of the neighborhood groups have also come together to form the Meriden Council of Neighborhoods, a nonprofit group comprised of members of neighborhood associations throughout the community. Swedock said this collaboration has allowed for funding to support events that would improve quality of life, including National Night Out.

Read the full article: www.MyRecordJournal.com – Meriden neighborhood associations thrive. Jason R. Vallee, Record-Journal staff

Vertigo and The Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership In A Connected Environment

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

Bill Traynor is a leading theoretician and practitioner in the field of community development. He is currently the Executive Director of Lawrence Community Works, an initiative that’s rebuilding the struggling city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, his hometown. He was the Director of Community Development for the Boston Community Training and Assistance Center, and the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Better Acre in Lowell, where he raised over a million dollars to support organizational growth and to implement several housing and economic development projects. The author of numerous articles on community development and community organizing, Traynor received a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University in 1998. During his tenure with LCW, Traynor grew the organization from a staff of two and a deficit, to a staff of 45 and an operating budget of over $2 million, while leveraging over $25 million in public and private project investments for affordable housing, infrastructure investments, a city-wide youth network, and a range of family asset building and community organizing initiatives.

The Nonprofit Quarterly features this article in its current edition. Read the full article: Vertigo and The Intentional Inhabitant; Leadership In A Connected Environment: « The Value Of Place. Excerpts:

I have had to grapple with trying to find a way to lead when many of the traditional levers of power and decision making are neither handy nor useful. Moving from a traditional environment to a network or connected environment can cause a kind of vertigo because the environment is so radically different. It operates by different rules and responds to different stimuli. To try to lead in a network environment armed only with the perspectives and skills honed in traditional settings, is unsettling and disorienting.

It’s About the Space

A network environment is dominated by space, and so it is the space that should dominate your attention. The leader in a connected environment has to understand that the power of these environments comes from the space, not the forms that populate the space. Therefore the critical function of the leader in the network is the recognition of, and the creation, preservation and protection of space.

What is meant by space in this context? Well, it’s time and opportunity mostly, as well as accessibility, flexibility and options. It is the time for unfolding, time for adaptation, time and opportunity for intentional and random bumping and connecting, for creation, for response, for listening and reacting, for deconstruction. It is the space in between, around, behind, on top of and underneath the all of the action, the commitments, the transactions – these things are all forms. Networks die when the space closes because in the clutter of commitments, expectations, structures, programs, partnerships etc, there is no more space for adaptation or response.

At LCW we try to build language, tools and systems to help us recognize, create, preserve and defend space. We try to resource the demand environment in lots of different ways so that we can get better at resourcing real life opportunities rather than concepts and ideas that we or funders come up with. We try to keep all of our teams and committees loose and flexible and leadership moving from person to person so that we can stay focused on ‘what we do’ rather than ‘who we are’. This creates space for experimentation and allows things to grow and also allows for things to go away when they aren’t useful anymore. We try to do the routine things as efficiently as possible so that we can save time for the complicated stuff.

Over the past several years I have found that there are three ways to create and preserve space in a network environment.

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Reflections on Community Organizing and Resident Engagement in the Rebuilding Communities Initiative

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

Reflections on Community Organizing

Reflections on Community Organizing and Resident Engagement in the Rebuilding Communities Initiative.

Bill Traynor. Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Reflections of a community’s struggle with resident engagement and community organizing. The report’s focus in on understanding the role and practice of community organizing and resident engagement in the context of a comprehensive community change initiative.

Highlights:

We tried many things; some worked, some did not. Throughout the process, we all participated in a collective struggle to understand and master the challenge of effective resident engagement in a complex, multi-faceted comprehensive community initiative … This monograph is a reflection on their struggle. Its focus is on understanding the role and practice of community organizing and resident engagement in the context of a comprehensive community change initiative. It is based on my own reflections on their work as well as the thoughts and experiences of dozens of residents, activists, and professionals who have been involved in RCI.

  • It is difficult to establish strong and reliable measures of success. To complicate matters further, the rhetoric of resident engagement and community building is now so banal as to render much of it meaningless.
  • The truth is this work is difficult to do well, especially over a long period of time. Moreover, even successful community-based organizations (CBOs), such as those selected to participate in RCI, face significant challenges as they try to build capacity to do this work.
  • At its core is the challenge of engaging residents and other stakeholders to shape new thinking, new policies, new actions, and new visions. Of course, this requires a new approach to how CBOs identify, educate, activate, and mobilize their constituencies.

Lessons learned:

  • Community building efforts can only be successful if they are concerned both with building social capital and implementing an agenda for change.
  • For many groups, the shift to a community-building approach represents a wholesale shift in organizational culture and operations.
  • An investment in developing professional community organizing capacity is necessary to get results from community-building work.
  • Community-building efforts suffer from a dangerous combination of high expectations and meager resources.

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