Capítulo II: Marco teórico y conceptual
2.4 Marco teórico
2.4.4 Estándares de Calidad Educativa Internacional
Capacities and Objectives Are Aligned
Community change efforts are complex and require significant capacity to imple- ment. The theory behind many of them is based in systems thinking, which views the strands of community life as interconnected and interdependent. Communi- ty change efforts are designed to take these connections into account and exploit them to achieve significant improvements in local conditions. The challenge is that the resulting design requires different capacities from those for traditional 3. There are many examples of the mismatch between expectations regarding outcomes and the scale of funding. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Urban Health Initiative’s investment of $70 mil- lion for citywide initiatives translated to $7 per child. As the UHI evaluators put it, “The question of how much change can result from an intervention of this size and scope, given larger economic and social trends, is critical to the final assessment of UHI. UHI was unusual in its long-term commitment and relatively large expenditures. Yet, the trends it was trying to reverse have persisted for at least 50 years, and the public budgets it was trying to leverage were thousands of times larger than the invest- ment itself. Had it met original expectations, UHI would have been an enormously rewarding invest- ment, the philanthropic world’s equivalent to being a founding investor in Microsoft or Google. But one can argue that modest impacts in selected and targeted areas are reasonable returns for a cautious investor, if not a venture capitalist” (Weitzman et al., 2009).
programs—capacities that underresourced organizations in distressed neighbor- hoods rarely have.
In too many community change efforts, the theory of change was too elabo- rate to be realized in practice so the interventions stumbled on implementation. (Yogi Berra could have been talking about community change efforts when he said, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in prac- tice there is.”)
The lesson here is that goals must be assessed in light of capacity to imple- ment, and if capacity is weak, there are two options: scale back the goals or invest in building capacity to do the work. Misalignment between goals and capacities seriously undermines the work. When ambitious time frames for change are overlaid on top of these highly complex interventions, some would say the ef- forts are set up for failure.
GUIDELINES FOR ENSURING THAT CAPACITIES ARE ALIGNED WITH THE NATURE OF THE WORK INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:
e Identify who is accountable for results and build in consequences for
success and failure. Accountability is diffuse in complex initiatives with multiple partners and stakeholders, so when things go awry there is no one to blame. Leadership, governance, and programs can drift without clear accountability definitions.
e Keep a sense of urgency and personal connection to the outcomes of the
work. Overemphasizing technical expertise and professionalism can cre- ate distance from the reality of the community.
e Create a “learning culture” at all levels of the work, from the funder’s
board to community residents to staff. Build in open and honest forma- tive feedback loops and communication vehicles. Position the evaluation as a tool for improving practice and nurturing the change process at each level of the work. This helps to balance the need for clarity and inten- tionality with a recognition of the organic, developmental, and emergent nature of this work.
e Aim for a creative blending of philanthropic and public dollars. Foun-
dations are likely to provide the most flexible funding for capacity build- ing activities, while public funds are likely to be more circumscribed for programmatic activities.
e If capacity building, leadership development, democratic decision- making, and the like are core parts of the community change effort, de-
fine them as outcomes and work with evaluators to establish measures
of them. As stakeholders reflect on what community change efforts have left behind, they often point to increases in capacity and connections.
Overarching Lesson 5: Comprehensiveness Is Even More Elusive
Than Previously Thought: Treat It as a Principle, Not a Goal
The field of community change has matured with regard to the topic of compre- hensiveness. In the early 1990s, initiatives took comprehensiveness quite literal- ly; they aimed to cover all domains of work and achieve “synergy” as all the parts interacted. Today, practitioners and observers agree that comprehensiveness is a lens that should guide all work and that it is impractical to try to do everything simultaneously.This is not just true at the local level but also at the field level. Despite years of trying to integrate the “sub-fields” of the antipoverty and community change arenas, the domains of work remain separate. In the 1990s, comprehensive com- munity building initiatives were described as vehicles designed explicitly to inte- grate three strands of work: social services, physical/economic development, and community organizing.4 The aim was to concentrate in one place “the best” of what had been learned through these three domains in order to achieve a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. However, integration occurred in very few places or organizations.
Some initiatives managed to fill gaps and co-locate a number of different kinds of programs in a particular neighborhood, but very few, if any, are truly weaving together human, physical, and civic development at the individual and community levels. Single institutions with power and resources have proven able to co-locate various strands of work in one local area. Examples include some of the largest and most sophisticated CDCs and community-based organizations or anchor institu- tions. More recently, embedded funders have demonstrated an ability to blend the work (albeit in smaller geographic areas). The MacArthur/LISC New Communi- ties Program in Chicago is attempting to co-locate a significant amount of com- munity planning, economic development, physical development, school reform, prisoner reentry, and human services in its target neighborhoods.
For the most part, the programmatic foundation of an organization dictates the orientation of its community change work. We can categorize the best-known place-based change efforts by whether their orientation is toward children and family services (Harlem Children’s Zone), physical and economic development 4. See for example Kubisch, 1996; Bruner & Parachini, 1997; Kingsley, McNeely, & Gibson, 1997.
(HOPE VI), or community organizing (Lawrence CommunityWorks). The dif- ficulty of integrating the three domains of work is compounded by the fact that each tends to look to its own sector for funding, infrastructure, expertise, and leadership: economic development tends toward the private sector; human de- velopment toward the public sector; and civic development toward the commu- nity/nonprofit/philanthropic sector.
GUIDELINES FOR THINKING ABOUT COMPREHENSIVENESS ARE AS FOLLOWS:
e Comprehensiveness is a principle that should guide the work and is not
a goal. The analysis of community problems and assets should be sys-
temic, and solutions must take into account the interconnections among various strands of work, but it is both impractical and overwhelming to try to do everything.
e Aim to co-locate lines of work and link up two or more complementary
lines of work, such as employment assistance with child care, or improv- ing nutrition with developing supermarket and recreation facilities, or community planning with design of new physical spaces. The need to link physical revitalization with school improvement has become in- creasingly clear. Build out from those starting points.
e All elements of the work need not and cannot exist within a single enti-
ty. Brokering and alignment among various actors on behalf of the entire community are crucial.
e Use flexible funds (usually philanthropic) to create linkages, coordinate in-
vestments, build capacity, and maintain an overall vision for a neighborhood.
Overarching Lesson 6: Embrace Community Building as Both a
Guiding Principle and a Deliberate Set of Actions
In community change efforts today, the role and purpose of “community build- ing” are still contested and unresolved. The lack of consensus is not about wheth- er community building should be a core element of community change efforts; the unanimous view on that question is, “yes.” The disagreement revolves around community building’s place in the overall theory of change guiding community interventions. Is it a means, an end, or both? Is it a principle that should guide the work or a definable set of actions? How much community building is needed?
The social services/human development arena can show examples of ways that community engagement has resulted in culturally appropriate service de-
sign and participant recruitment. For example, Latino Health Access’s use of community members as promotores makes their services relevant and welcoming for community residents. In the Harlem Children’s Zone, awareness of commu- nity norms and practices about parenting led to a program to teach parents about verbal communication and positive feedback in their interactions with their chil- dren. In Making Connections–San Antonio, leaders originally placed priority on homeownership but changed their strategy after learning from residents that car purchases had to come first, because transportation was critical to keeping a job. Similarly, asking residents what kind of housing or commercial develop- ment is most needed has helped community change efforts focusing on physical development ensure that their product responds to community needs. In some cases, it may even have preempted opposition to new construction. Mobilizing residents around new physical development plans has led to community benefits agreements and enabled neighborhood leaders to make demands on public- and private-sector institutions.
The community change efforts with the strongest community building components see this dimension of the work as both a principle that guides all decision-making and as a set of actions that operationalize the principle. For example, most of the community change efforts reviewed here state that com- munity engagement is a guiding principle for their work. To operationlize this principle, they might develop a governance structure that includes community representatives and outreach strategies to ensure resident input into their plans. Many go out of their way to structure in ongoing resident input. They might conduct “community listening” activities regularly, provide opportunities for residents to review and analyze data about the work, and encourage youth par- ticipation to develop the next generation of leadership. They also name commu- nity participation as one of their desired outcomes and make sure that evalua- tions measure progress on that front.
GUIDELINES FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING ARE AS FOLLOWS:
e Community building is a philosophy, value, and principle that under-
girds all decision-making in a community change effort. It also is a set of
actions that structure participation, capacity building, and connections. When values and actions are combined, the community building effect can be powerful.
e Be clear about the role and purpose of community building in the
work. Not all community building is the same, and actions need to be tailored to the specific goals desired.
e Make sure that evaluation and learning value and attend to the com-
munity building dimensions of the work, tracking their results over the
long run.
e Often, small grants or other modest amounts of support can unleash
energy and talent that give momentum to community building.
e At its best, community building changes the nature of the relationship
between a community and power brokers, ensuring that neighborhood
residents are at the table in corporate board meetings, city council meet- ings, and the like.
e Invest in individual community builders. A retrospective look at the
trajectory of leaders from community building efforts 10 to 20 years ago shows that many advanced and became change agents in various institu- tions and sectors.
Several big questions about investments in community building remain unan- swered: Do increases in individual and community capacities and connections lead to longer-term impacts such as community resiliency or improvements in socioeconomic well-being for poor communities and their residents? Do they lead to fundamental, transformative shifts in power relations between the com- munity and outside political and economic resources? We need to keep look- ing for ways to test these questions and build evidence about the links between community building and improvements in individual and community outcomes. Without this evidence, the debate about the value of community building contin- ues, and decisions are based on anecdote, ideology, and speculation.