Defining Community Capacity: A Framework and Implications from a Comprehensive Community Initiative
During the 1990s, many comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) focused in particular on community building as both a neighborhood transformation strategy and an outcome. This research paper analyzes the practice of building community capacity, which can come from many different neighborhood sources, and how to use that concept as a way to measure progress.
After a preliminary assessment of the community’s assets – individuals, neighborhood groups and local institutions – the goal should be to engage these parties in a process of connection. Building community capacity with a comprehensive approach means orchestrating instrumental links among these different types of assets in addition to supporting these assets directly.
Introduction
Over the past decade or so, there has been a significant renewed emphasis on community-based approaches to promoting social change and economic development, delivering services, and addressing the needs of people in poverty. In the urban context, “community” has generally referred to neighborhood—a geographically defined subarea of the city in which residents are presumed to share both spatial proximity and some degree of mutual circumstance, need, priorities, and access to the broader metropolitan area and the systems that have an impact on their lives. The current generation of these efforts, perhaps most clearly exemplified by a growing set of “comprehensive community initiatives” (CCIs) operating across the country, focuses in particular on notions of comprehensive development within neighborhoods and the importance of “community building” as both a means to neighborhood transformation and as a principal outcome goal. While much of the impetus for these efforts has come from the nonprofit sector and from foundations that have designed, catalyzed, and funded numerous initiatives to explore and promote community-building efforts in neighborhoods across the country, increasing interest can be seen in the public sector as well, from city- and state-driven initiatives to the enactment of the federal Empowerment Zone legislation in over 100 local communities.
Fundamentally, community building in these efforts concerns strengthening the capacity of communities to identify priorities and opportunities and to work to foster and sustain positive neighborhood change. The notion of community “capacity building” is both explicit and pervasive in the rhetoric that describes, the missions that guide, and, to a greater or lesser extent, the activities that embody these efforts. However, as with other vanguard terms used to catalyze and drive action in the field (“community,” “comprehensiveness,” “empowerment”), there is limited clarity about the meaning of “capacity” and “capacity building” at the neighborhood level. What, in concrete, operational terms, does community capacity mean? What are the components of community capacity within neighborhoods? How might these components be operationalized through planned efforts? In what ways can they be seen, measured, and understood in action?
This paper has three goals:
- Suggests a definitional framework for understanding community capacity
- Explore the attempt to operationalize a capacity-building agenda through the examination of two contrasting case studies
- Suggest some preliminary conclusions about the possibilities and constraints of community capacity building through social-change efforts like CCIs