โ Scribed by Pablo Eisenberg
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Despite great odds, low-income neighborhoods and communities in urban and depressed rural areas are beginning to show encouraging signs of revitalization. In large part, these signs of progress are due to the hard work of grassroots community organizations, with the support of local governments, other nonprofit groups, and philanthropic institutions. These groups are rehabilitating and building new affordable housing, launching commercial and economic development projects, working with police to eliminate drugs and violent crime, pushing for educational reform, and creating community leadership. The hope of creating stable and productive neighborhoods rests on the work of effective community organizations.
At long last, we have learned some hard lessons about building strong communities. The first and most important is that such efforts cannot be successful unless residents themselves are a major part of the processes of planning, implementation, and evaluation. In very poor neighborhoods, where disinvestment, discrimination, institutional breakdowns, and municipal neglect have been rampant, strong community-based organizations, churches, and other nonprofits are especially important. They are the key to enabling these neighborhoods to come to the community bargaining table with the resources, power, and influence to make a real difference. It is a sad fact, unfortunately, that real participation of this kind is often not encouraged or practiced.
The second lesson is that community building or revitalization cannot be achieved in a scattered, piecemeal fashion. Our efforts must be comprehensive and strategic. At the grassroots level, this means that the old tensions and separation between organizing and development, between one-issue and multipurpose organizations, between social services and advocacy, no longer can have as much currency as in the past. They are all part of a low-incomecommunity strategy, and these organizations must learn and be encouraged to work together and fight for the common good of their low-income constituencies. Local grassroots coalitions offer a strategy whose time has come, but they are also the hardest organizations to sustain financially.
The third lesson we have learned is that neighborhood and community building takes money-big money. Imbedded in our history or sense of individualism
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
Community Building, Coming of Age reports the analysis of successful community endeavors to address poverty from five traditions of community work: faith-based institutions and settlement houses; mass-based community organizations; structured citizen participation; community-based evelopment organiz