Community Development: A Foundation Perspective

John Foster-Bey

Foundation experience with community development probably began in the 1960s with the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Programs and Mobilization for Youth, both of which became prototypes, or models, for the War on Poverty. At that time, the War on Poverty started what was called the community action approach, a new concept that ran into problems with the political establishments in most cities almost immediately. This was the natural result of the War on Poverty's funding of many groups at the neighborhood level to challenge city hall to do things differently. By the late 1960s, community action programs had evolved into the economic development model exemplified by community development corporations (CDCs).

One surprising thing about community development is that despite a thirty-year history, there is not really a precise definition of the field. Definitions have tended to encompass the activities of a variety of locally-based actors attempting to improve the social and economic functioning of a particular place. Given its roots in the War on Poverty, most people have primarily focused on improving the conditions of poor people and places. They work to stem the resource leakage that can destroy the local economy by ensuring that businesses are controlled by local organizations. An additional area of community development organization (CDO) intervention is in attempts to improve the community's social foundations. The Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation is generally thought of as the first of these groups. Though they are funded by the government as well, funding from foundations is important, because it comes with fewer restrictions, allowing for greater latitude and local discretion in its use, than government funds. Early CDCs were large, multi-functional organizations that employed many community people.

The first wave of CDOs were replaced in the 1980s by "lean and mean" groups, focused on one or two activities, such as housing and commercial real estate development. These groups abandoned the involvement in direct business activities and social development that characterized the older wave, because of the loss of federal support for their activities. Public support dwindled as the neighborhoods of the CDCs continued to decline. Concerned that the government funding streams were inadequate, the foundation community decided to encourage the private sector to support community development. To attain the support of business, quantitative documentation of the success of the CDCs was needed. So, in the early 1980s, the Ford Foundation tried to move the field forward by creating a national financial intermediary called the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC). LISC focused on providing financial capital and raising money from the for-profit sector and foundations. Since the 1980s, foundations and the private sector, as well as the government, have focused a large share of their support on funding CDCs. There are probably about three thousand CDCs nationally, mostly single purpose entities, focusing primarily on brick and mortar projects. These CDCs form an infrastructure for neighborhood revitalization and are funded mainly by foundations and other philanthropic giving, with a substantial contribution from the public sector as well.

The second major category in the field is community empowerment and organizing, which also has roots in the community action work early in the War on Poverty. It owes much of its current work to activists such as Saul Alinski, and his Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago. Their core belief is that people in poor places are poor because they lack the power to force the system to respond to their needs and concerns. The response then, is to form organizations that will press for their interests with these powerful establishments. By this means, there would be some redistribution of resources, and poor places would be improved because more services would be delivered there. In this context, community organizing is both confrontational and consensus building or collaborative. Many CDCs actually started as this type of community organization. Because of this, there is often an interesting tension between these two branches of community revitalization work. This part of the field is not well funded, with most support coming from small, socially progressive foundations, and from funding by church-based philanthropy, such as the Campaign for Human Development.

The third category is neighborhood-based social development, or human capital development. The roots of these efforts are again the War on Poverty, but also the settlement house movement that began in the early part of this century. In this model, the poor must become acculturated to the values and norms of the mainstream in order to improve their skills and ability to succeed. Social services and social programs help to meet and address immediate needs and problems, but they also provide the opportunity to develop skills, attitudes, and values necessary for success. This strategy resulted in an array of programs delivered at the neighborhood level. Much of the funding for these programs comes from community and family foundations and from corporate giving, including the United Way.

The last category is an emerging one: the comprehensive, or community-building approach, a new interpretation of another War on Poverty strategy, Model Cities. Model Cities sought to collaborate and coordinate programs and sectors to encourage a multifrontal attack on poverty in particular poor places, and to coordinate a whole range of services to do that. This strategy emphasizes more collaboration and less confrontation. While many consider the Model Cities program to have failed from an operational and political point of view, the comprehensive approach grew out of a recognition that, despite some notable success with the spheres of activity discussed above, conditions in poor communities were not improving. This strategy represents a merging and synergy among the three strategies, and a tailoring of them to local needs. Foundations and CDCs are currently experimenting with the comprehensive approach. Almost all of these have been difficult to initiate and to evaluate.

Community development is still struggling to achieve its promise, even as the national economy has become more global. As the economy and social structure of most metropolitan areas has changed, the field, and the foundations which have supported it, are now faced with an enormous challenge. One of the major areas of concern is whether revitalizing poor places is still relevant. If so, how can it be reconciled with institutional changes now taking place? All of the data now suggest that we can no longer look at cities, and neighborhoods within cities, as self-contained units. With population growing much more rapidly outside than inside center cities, it may not be possible to revitalize poor communities by focusing on place-based strategies alone. Several of us in the foundation community have begun to explore other approaches that are less dependent on local, or even metropolitan, approaches. This exploration arises from a growing interest in providing economic opportunity for the poor, based on the premise that what is at the root of the problems in poor places may be the lack of opportunity for steady income and upward mobility for poor individuals and families.

William Julius Wilson, now at Harvard, has talked about healthy communities as being places that are organized around work and production, a sharp contrast to the conditions in most poor places now. The hypothesis is that given access to economic opportunity, poor people will have the wherewithal to find or create their own healthy communities. The only way to get rid of poor places and poverty is to ensure that poor people become fully functioning participants in the mainstream economy. The economy is not neighborhood-based. In order to improve economic opportunities for poor people, we have to build bridges between poor places and the regional and metropolitan economy. While few foundations have clearly articulated a program strategy premised on supporting regional approaches, some of the early work around employment and economic opportunity is opening this area up for much wider scrutiny. For example, some of us have been exploring ways to increase access for poor job seekers to the entry-level jobs being created in many suburbs, in a process known as reverse commuting, or worker mobility. Funders also have a growing interest in finding ways to connect employment programs for the poor to private employers. Several years ago, a colleague and I at the Ford Foundation started looking at what we called sector development employment projects, which were an approach to try to link employment programs for the poor with targeted industries such as health care, manufacturing, or printing, which may have opportunities, but not be located near poor communities. At this point, there are several such projects.

Foundations have begun to think more about the issue of concentrated poverty in relation to the housing field. Some of us have started to question whether some of the early work we supported may have contributed to poverty concentration by focusing affordable housing in already low-income communities. As a result, we are talking about how to create mixed-income communities, which in the past we might have considered tantamount to gentrification. We're also beginning to look at ways to more equitably distribute low-income housing around metropolitan regions, rather than concentrating it in poor neighborhoods. Does this mean that foundations have decided to move away from the traditional community development field for what may seem greener pastures? I don't think so. Most funders continue to support traditional CDCs, although I do think there's a shift toward a comprehensive, or community-building approach. Foundations are only beginning to examine whether these two approaches may be in conflict, or whether there may be a way of creating a more synergistic strategy.

Current social, economic and political factors that are determining the ways metropolitan areas are developing may force foundations, city governments, and community practitioners to slightly restate a popular saying: Rather than think globally and act locally, we may have to think locally and act regionally if we want to see real improvement for poor people. If community development is not placed within a regional or metropolitan framework, it will only achieve modest results at best, and at worst may be an utter failure. Likewise, if the focus on the needs and concerns of the poor, which should be the hallmark of a good community development approach, is not integrated into regional approaches, the potential benefits of regionalism will continue to elude the poor, and the conditions in the core cities will only get worse.