building blocks for building communities
Our news feed of Stories of CommunityThe Resident Leadership and Facilitation Training is designed to help participants gain an understanding of the skills needed to lead successful meetings that result in decisions about actions that will achieve desired results.
via Resident Leadership and Facilitation Work Book. Annie E. Casey Foundation 2008
This is the product of a research project. Community Voices Heard: Changing People and Public Policy through Low-Income Organizing is a case study of grassroots organizing. Based on research directed by Ann Rivera of the New York University Center for Community Research & Action, and funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the piece highlights how a membership organization of low-income individuals can be an effective force for social, economic, and political change.
A team of three researchers collected data spanning ten years of CVH’s history from our beginning in 1994 to 2005, examining three different organizing campaigns: the passage of the Transitional Jobs Program law in NYC, the implementation of the program, and the ongoing improvement and preservation of the program. In-depth interviews were conducted with CVH members, current and former CVH staff, policy researchers and representatives from local labor unions, funding agencies, government agencies and offices, and other grassroots advocacy groups.
The case study helps to demystify what organizing really is, and outlines how CVH used successful strategies to actually change public policy to improve the lives of thousands of low-income people. It identifies and points to some basic tenets that can be useful to other groups undertaking similar work.
Findings from the research uncover some essentials for engaging low-income constituents to participate in public policy processes:
Additionally, the research highlights some of the critical strategies for groups striving to achieve concrete policy change:
via About CVH | Community Voices Heard. CVH Documentation Report.pdf
Edited by Karen Fulbright-Anderson and Patricia Auspos. The Aspen Institute 2006.
A growing body of literature has begun to document encouraging lessons about interventions and factors that contribute to positive changes in communities. While the evidence base is, for the most part, neither strong nor robust enough to provide definitive answers to some of the most vexing questions about community change, the literature points to promising areas that deserve sustained, careful attention. The purpose of this volume is to pull such insights together in one place.
The volume includes reviews of literature from the following programmatic areas, hereafter referred to as strands—community building, neighborhood safety, education, employment, economic development, housing, youth development, and social services. The authors draw on the experiences of a range of community- based efforts to bring about positive community change, including formal organizations, such as community development corporations and comprehensive community initiatives, and less formal associations of community residents.
COMMUNITYCHANGE-FINAL.PDF (application/pdf Object).
See also: Improve the Community, Deter the Criminal
William J. Traynor, Jessica Andors . Shelterforce 2005.
Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement. In most cities, public or civic life is a hostile environment for the average person, ruled by cynicism and division, and dominated by entrenched habits of isolation and detachment. Unfortunately, while our community development field is engineered to build the physical things communities need — new homes, community centers and small businesses — and to some extent, to influence the policy that supports those products, we are not designed to attack this condition.
The author describes how his organization — Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a CDC based in Lawrence, Massachusetts — is using a “network organizing” strategy to overcome this situation. This strategy connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life — from the neighborhood group to the City Council — in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. LCW’s approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking helps challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement and helps shape a strong demand environment for change.
via KnowledgePlex: Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement, March/April 2005.
