Community Building Coming of Age

This monograph (May 1997) by James O. Gibson, G. Thomas Kingsley and Joseph B. McNeely discusses the community building approach to address the problems and opportunities of both impoverished inner-city neighborhoods and rural areas.

Community building works by building community in individual neighborhoods: neighbors learning to rely on each other, working together on concrete tasks that take advantage of new self-awareness of their collective and individual assets and, in the process, creating human, family, and social capital that provides a new base for a more promising future and reconnection to America's mainstream.

It is not a uniformly defined methodology; different themes dominate its application in different places. It has not been fully evaluated or even tested at a broad scale. And it is not totally new — a number of its component techniques have been in use individually for decades.

Probably the feature that most starkly contrasts community building with approaches to poverty alleviation that have been typical in America over the past half-century is that its primary aim is not simply giving more money, services, or other material benefits to the poor.

While most of its advocates recognize a continuing need for considerable outside assistance (public and private), community building's central theme is to obliterate feelings of dependency and to replace them with attitudes of self-reliance, self-confidence, and responsibility.

It gives high priority to establishing and reinforcing sound values. And these are not ideas being imposed from the outside — they are what the leaders of distressed neighborhoods across the nation themselves are saying they want to see accomplished.

The chapters in this monograph cover:

• Executive Summary
• Context and Convergence: communitybased initiatives, urban problems and the importance of community
• Themes of the new community building
• Recommendations: supporting broader application of effective community building

Follow this link to the Urban Institutue website to read the monograph on community building (opens in a new browser window)

For further information

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