Exploring New Relationships Across Service Systems Reform, Community Organizing and Community Economic Development
To build bridges between systems reform, community organizing and community development, TWC will shortly publish a paper entitled, Building Community: Exploring New Relationships Across Service Systems Reform, Community Organizing and Community Economic Development.
Summary of the paper
Historically, there have been three relatively distinct efforts to produce change within neighborhoods. For the purposes of this paper, these are described as three different arenas -- service systems reform (SSR), community economic development (CED), and community organizing (CO). While these arenas share some common philosophical underpinnings and often exist within the same community, they generally operate independently from one another. Moreover, they have different cultures and values and embody different strategies for producing community change. Often, they have no knowledge of each others' existence, let alone any detailed understanding of each others' missions and how they might connect with one another.
This paper is based upon a belief that building communities of necessity will entail actions in all three arenas. It is our belief that activities that confine themselves to work within only one arena, however successful and comprehensive they are within that arena, will be insufficient to build the kind of community where children, youth, and families thrive socially and economically with great predictability. In this paper, building community will refer to comprehensive approaches to improve the well-being of a geographic neighborhood by simultaneously working to improve the human, social, political, and economic capital of a community. While this may or may not involve weaving these three arenas together, it will require significant work in each.
Residents in distressed and disinvested neighborhoods may not see their neighborhood's challenges as separable into these three arenas. These categorizations may be due more to external opportunities for support than to indigenous desires for change. Still, there is a purpose for drawing, and perhaps overdrawing, the distinctions among these arenas in this paper. There is a need to challenge communities and the neighborhoods they represent to view child, youth, family and neighborhood needs comprehensively -- and to be on guard for fragmented approaches that focus only upon activities within one arena.
The second section of this paper describes each of these arenas in some detail, to identify both their commonalities and differences and to provide an overview of the progress each has made in building community. This section's purpose to provide an awareness and understanding of each of these arenas in order to discuss how they may fit into an overall community building strategy.
The third section suggests some steps that can be taken to begin to connect these arenas and determine where strategic alliances, collaborative approaches, or joint efforts might be undertaken. This section's purpose is to spur dialogue and action across participants in these three arenas in exploring new roles and relationships that can further community building within distressed and disinvested communities.
There is an urgency in taking practical, as well as conceptual, steps to determine how these different arenas should be more consciously linked. This paper provides as introduction to this critical issue of linking family, community, and economic development.
To order a copy of this paper, please send $7.00 to: The Institute for Educational Leadership, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 310, Washington DC 20036.
TWC Services
TWC is available to conduct local level dialogues among leaders in service systems reform, community economic development, and community organizing based on this paper. We believe such dialogues can lead to joint planning and action, which enhance prospects of better results. TWC also offers follow-up assistance to local communities where requested.
