This case study analyzes an attempt to develop the ability of community organizations and groups to coordinate their efforts in implementing state legislation for the deinstitutionalization of status offenders. The intervention was carried out by a "networker," whose responsibilities closely resembled those associated with the "ombudsman" role proposed by . Using a strategy emphasizing locality development (Rothman, 1968), the networker organized community meetings where organizations concerned with the legislation were brought together for the purpose of resource exchange. A variety of collaborative projects involving shared resources resulted from these networking meetings. The implications of the intervention for developing community competence are discussed, with special attention being paid to the roles that intangible resources and commitment to the geographical community play in networking. The need for comparative research on network development that goes beyond the casestudy approach is also addressed. In his 1972 presidential address to the Division of Community Psychology, Iscoe (1974) urged his colleagues to undertake the challenging task of facilitating the development of competent communities. Reviews of the community psychology literature, however, suggest that this challenge has been accepted by only a few community psychologists (Lounsbury, Leader, Meares, & Cook, 1980; McClure et al., 1980; Novaco & Monahan, 1980). McClure et al., for example, found that less than 3% of the articles they sampled from the American Journal of Community Psychology and the Journal of Community Psychology over a 4-year period (1975 to 1978) reported communitylevel interventions.
This was the case even though a conceptual framework emphasizing competence building at the systems level was used by authors in over 40% of the articles to introduce and discuss their ideas.
This article, we believe, provides an example of community psychology practice that is more reflective of community psychology theory than has typically been the case. It describes a collaborative effort of a university-based community psychologist and a community-based one, a strategy that McClure et al. (1980) see as being conducive to the achievement of community-level interventions. The Need to Enhance Community Competence:
The Families-with-Service-Needs Legislation Connecticut, like many other states, is attempting to comply with a mandate from the U.S. Oflice of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to deinstitutionalize status offenders. The 1979 and 1980