Beyond the Neighborhood: Community Building Initiatives, Neighborhood Organizations and Systems Change
Neighborhoods are often invoked as units of action for promoting social change, arguably providing critical capacities (e.g., leadership, organizational resources, networks of association) that can be mobilized to respond to local problems in ways that are responsive to the priorities and concerns of those who live there. Neighborhoods, however, are not self-contained; they are nested within complex social, economic, and political systems, are influenced by changes happening at different spatial scales, and are affected by the decisions and actions of a range of players beyond their boundaries.
Both of these orientations—toward neighborhoods as units of action and toward neighborhoods as part of broader systems—are central to the ideas behind comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs), which seek both to build the capacity of communities to plan, act, and catalyze change at the neighborhood level and to better connect neighborhoods to (and increase their influence over) the systems, institutions, and actors that have an impact on them. In spite of this dual orientation, however, most CCIs have tended to focus more on the community building than the systems-change agenda. What are the factors that condition these tendencies, and how can CCIs engage effectively in broader systems change?
Methods
This paper is based on research conducted as part of the evaluation of the New Communities Program (NCP), the largest contemporary CCI at work in the United States. NCP operates within 14 neighborhoods in Chicago and serves as the template for the national roll-out of LISC’s Building Sustainable Communities Initiative. The paper takes a comparative case study approach based on two years of field research, including in-depth key informant interviews, document review, and field observations in four NCP neighborhoods. The neighborhoods were selected for the variation they provide along several key dimensions including neighborhood context, the organizational capacity of community organizations serving as lead agencies for the initiative, their strategic orientation to systems change, and the ways in which they have organized themselves vis-à-vis other community actors.
Results
Whether, where, and how NCP community organizations develop a policy agenda is highly contingent on organizational and contextual factors. Alliances with policy-level actors are crucial in providing the initial access that is necessary to launch such efforts, and sometimes to generating the leverage that is necessary to succeed. The organizations studied have tended to pursue nonconfrontational tactics and to focus on relatively modest goals. Those that were able to pursue these goals with persistence and agility achieved greater success, but the odds against policy and systems impact are significant. Still, even when unsuccessful in their initial aims, policy-engagement efforts often generate unexpected benefits in the form of new relationships, alliance, and capacity.
Conclusions and implications: The study provides insight into the factors that promote and constrain community organizational action toward policy and systems change and suggest implications for moving beyond the neighborhood through an emphasis on issue identification, cross-neighborhood organizing, and broader alliances. It also sheds light on the potentially crucial role of intermediary organizations in promoting system-change work and extending impact.