At the Epicenter and the Fenceline: How Community-Based Organizations Serve As Neighborhood Organizations

Hybrid community-based organizations (CBOs) that combine services and organizing can play an important role in low-income neighborhoods. As community members face marginalization and exclusion due to political decisions, CBOs use this combination of services and organizing to respond to their political environment (Gates, 2014; Hyde, 1992). CBOs also have requirements due to policy constraints and can play a role in poverty governance at the local level (e.g. Miller, 2014), so CBOs must navigate competing contexts. In addition, neighborhoods will have different levels of concentrated poverty, access to social services, pressures from displacement, and histories of immigration, segregation, and activism. With these differing influences, this paper examines how a CBO’s neighborhood context can shape their work. I look at CBOs located at the fenceline and at the epicenter to examine how a CBO’s neighborhood location intersects with their mission and their interactions with social welfare systems.

Methodology

This paper is part of a ethnographic study of frontline work in two purposefully selected Los-Angeles hybrid CBOs that combine service provision with community organizing. Both organizations were selected due to their critique of traditional service provision and their relationship to their neighborhood. One organization works in a social service hub where community members face threats of over-policing and displacement and the other CBO works in a predominantly immigrant community. Thus, this sample provides an opportunity to compare across two neighborhoods with differing histories and social service infrastructures. Data includes participation observation, 70 interviews with staff and community members, and document review. Through constructing organizational histories based on staff and community members’ descriptions and mapping out key partnerships within and outside the neighborhood, I describe how each CBO serves as a neighborhood organization.

Findings

Both organizations identify as community-based, but they have different ways of representing community members that is influenced by their history as well as other neighborhood institutions. One CBO is in a neighborhood described as the ‘epicenter of human rights violations’ and that has a dense service infrastructure. This CBO stands out in their approach as a ‘fight-back organization’. They serve as a watchdog, helping to question practices of nonprofits and institutions within the neighborhood based on residents' concerns. The second CBO is a larger organization and provides a community space for a working-poor immigrant community in a ‘fenceline’ community. This CBO serves as a bridge through connecting residents to institutions and highlighting the strengths of community members.

Significance

This study increases our understanding of community practice by discussing two distinct roles for CBOs that are based on the history and neighborhood context. Whether they are speaking out against other nonprofits or institutions in their neighborhood or serving as a bridge and connecting residents to resources, CBOs play a key role at the neighborhood level. I discuss the different ways that CBOs respond to the social service infrastructure and neighborhood characteristics and represent the interests of community members. This expands our understanding of the role of grassroots community organizations within social welfare and social policy at the neighborhood level.