Resultados

The broadest community building goal is to increase community civic capacity, defined as “the ability to influence or shape policy, practice, and resources in the public, nonprofit, for-profit, and philanthropic sectors in ways that increase the scale, scope, and effectiveness of community change activities” (Auspos et al., 2009). Civic capacity is a key goal for community change interventions because it has the potential to trigger ongoing improvements in outcomes for individuals, families, and communities over the long run. The community change field is still young in this arena; evidence about how to do it and what it accomplishes are still emerging. Still, the strategies that community change efforts can and do pursue to enhance their communities’ civic capacity are becoming clearer. Three have dominated the recent generation of efforts: community data analysis, community planning, and community organizing.

Community Data Analysis

The community change field has used—and strengthened—methods for commu- nity data collection and analysis. For example, the Redwood Coast Rural Action initiative in four Northern California counties brought together two universities and the Humboldt Area Foundation in an effort to develop accurate data about the regional economy for planning, action, and advocacy. The Annie E. Casey Foundation established local learning partnerships in Making Connections sites that involve residents and organizations in collecting, analyzing, and using data

to assess community circumstances and advocate for change. The Rockefeller Foundation’s Community Planning and Action Program helped local institu- tions build data capacity—sometimes at a university (e.g., Case Western Reserve in Cleveland) and sometimes through a nonprofit (Urban Strategies Council in Oakland and DC Agenda in Washington). This laid the foundation for what has become one of the most important new resources in the community change field, the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a consortium of local data intermediaries connected through the Urban Institute.

Community data can facilitate more than just the technical dimensions of planning; it also serves political ends. The term democratization of data emerged over the past decade to capture this aspect of data use, and more public access is indeed occurring. The increased availability of community-level data has already begun to give residents information they can use to advocate for and hold institu- tions accountable to neighborhood needs, and it has the potential to become an even more powerful resource in the future.

Community Planning

A second strategy that CCIs and other community interventions use to build lo- cal civic capacity is a participatory neighborhood planning process that brings local voices, knowledge, and commitment together into a vision for the neigh- borhood’s future. The availability of local area data has improved these planning processes significantly. The planning process launched by the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP) in the South Bronx has become a sort of guidepost for the field. CCRP developed five neighborhood plans that drove the initiative. Its planning model served as a guide for the MacArthur/ LISC New Communities Program in Chicago and, ultimately, in LISC’s nation- wide Sustainable Communities initiative. Other neighborhood-driven planning processes make use of door-to-door surveys, living room meetings, locally de- cided small grants programs, and traditional community organizing around local priorities. Community plans have served not only as a way for residents to come together for common purpose but also as a launch pad for neighborhood action and interaction with outside entities.

Practitioners and organizers have developed high-quality, comprehensive community planning processes that various stakeholders view as legitimate by applying the following guidelines:

e Beware of community “gatekeepers” whose voices and opinions are most easily heard by outside funders, technical assistance providers, and facilitators. Effective community planning processes utilize strate- gies to elicit and incorporate the views and participation of less-visible,

less-outspoken, and less-connected residents. The youth organizing field, for example, has developed innovative ways of reaching disen- gaged youth.

e Not every community resident has to be involved all the time. Commu- nity participation can and should vary according to the outcomes sought and the effort’s stage of development. It is now clear, for example, that employment programs do not require broad community engagement; rather, they need individuals and institutions to link residents with train- ing programs and employers. Neighborhood safety programs, on the oth- er hand, often need to engage youth, parents, the elderly, social service providers, police departments, and local housing authorities.

e Community planning is not constant. In some cases, a participatory planning process occurs at the beginning of an initiative and establishes a platform for future work. In other cases, such as with the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia Initiative, outreach only occurs when the management needs local input into a specific project. One caveat is that some communities have been victims of overplanning, with differ- ent outside entities conducting separate, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory planning processes in the same area. When this happens, the planning process is delegitimized and residents become cynical. To avoid this, some local offices in LISC’s Sustainable Communities initia- tive are building on preexisting community plans. Although they may sacrifice some buy-in and momentum that come from developing a new community plan, they avoid reinventing the wheel.

e Planning shouldn’t substitute for action. A major challenge is how and when to move from planning to action. While some of the early CCIs spent as long as two years on planning, it has become clear that two years is too long for most stakeholders to stay engaged. Current efforts have a shorter planning cycle and move more fluidly, and organically, between planning and acting. For example, they might embark on some early “quick wins” to gain traction and momentum, even as they build strate- gies for broader institutional and policy reform. One of the earliest lead- ers in the CCI field advocated for “planning while doing” and insisted that planning stood hand in hand with action—never alone.

Community Organizing

In the early years of traditional CCIs, much of the community organizing work fell under the broad umbrella of “consensus organizing.” Advocates of this ap- proach focused on the fact that comprehensive change in the most disinvested communities required effective working relationships across a multitude of com- munity, private, and public institutions. Since poor communities had long been disconnected from outside entities, the key to sustained long-term change was to build cooperative connections. Critics of this approach suggested that com- munity builders were naïve about the realities of power arrangements and where vested interests lay. They faulted CCIs for not having strong community advo- cacy/organizing components and for designing apolitical but programmatically sound neighborhood change strategies. Instead, they argued, community change agents should be prepared to confront and make demands on a wide range of institutions that can determine the neighborhood’s trajectory.

Over the past decade, community organizing has broadened in ways that em- phasize matching organizing strategies to specific issues, community histories, and leadership capacities and cultures. Virtually all of the work focuses broadly on holding the public and private sectors accountable to the community. Many community change efforts aim to help community residents and interests get to the governance table and stay actively involved. Along the way, organizing direct- ly addresses the distrust and apathy that can grow in the wake of false promises and inconsistency.

On the public sector side, organizing efforts advocate for local government to provide new services or programs for the neighborhood, such as parks and garbage pickup, or to fulfill its existing responsibilities (around, say, code en- forcement or policing). They also work to ensure that government programs are implemented effectively by mobilizing residents to take advantage of exist- ing benefits, such as EITC or state child health insurance programs. Some of the more innovative projects encourage residents to get into “the business of gov- ernment,” as Lawrence CommunityWorks does when it teaches citizens about public budgeting and encourages them to advocate for the community at key mo- ments in the policy cycle.

Organizing and advocacy targeted at the private sector generally focus on ensuring that the community benefits from new investments in housing, infra- structure, and economic development. In many of the largest city redevelopment activities, such as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and the Staples Center in Los An- geles, resident mobilization has ensured that community benefits agreements are in place to guarantee jobs at family-supporting wages, affordable housing, local hiring, responsible contracting, and investments in parks and recreation. In Denver, for instance, two neighborhoods that were part of the Annie E. Casey

Foundation’s Making Connections initiative bordered on the site where a major manufacturing plant was scheduled for redevelopment. Casey provided grants to a coalition of community groups, convened by the Front Range Economic Strat- egy Center, that worked together to ensure that the developer agreed to decent jobs, affordable housing, environmental cleanup procedures, a ban on big-box stores, and other conditions to benefit local residents as a condition for receiving city subsidies.

Two critiques persist about the ways in which current community change efforts approach community organizing. The first revolves around whether the organizing work genuinely hears and represents the perspectives of area resi- dents. There is an ongoing sense that the professionals, organizational staff, and community gatekeepers who run initiatives dominate the agenda-setting process and actions. In this view, community organizing is meant to create buy-in for the- ories of change and outcomes that are externally defined. Questions that remain are whether and how a community change effort initiated from the outside can achieve genuine community responsiveness, representativeness, and, perhaps most important, trust.

The second critique is that community organizing in this field still avoids ad- dressing the fundamental power imbalances that structure opportunity in Amer- ica. It is organizing for the narrower ends of projects or initiatives, which thus swims against the tide of powerful interests, that maintains the status quo or, at best, treat only the symptoms. Because those interests are racially organized, the empowerment work is even more complex than issue- or class-based organizing. Emerging regional equity efforts, such as those pursued by the Gamaliel Metro Equity Campaigns, are beginning to take on this set of issues. New organizing ef- forts focused on youth and immigrants might also inject new energy in this work and help strengthen the social and political potential of organizing among highly mobile populations.

Investments that Facilitate Engagement between the