Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy Book

Building Social Capital provides new insights into an important national community development challenge: how to stimulate the formation of genuinely community-based organizations and effective citizen action in neighborhoods that have not spawned these efforts spontaneously. Since Robert Putman's identification of the role of social capital in regional governance and economic development in Italy (1993), and later suggestions of its importance in the United States (1995), there has been a virtual industry of interest and action created around the implications of his findings for the development of low income communities. Yet, there remains a paucity of detailed empirical effort testing and refining his ideas. This book attempts to fill this gap. Building Social Capital distills lessons from a national demonstration program undertaken by a major national community development intermediary, the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC). The demonstration employed a novel approach to community organizing/consensus organizing; in an attempt to enhance social capital, building both stronger internal ties and capacity in low income communities and fostering new relations between residents of low income communities and larger metropolitan area support communities. Using evaluation research and detailed comparative study of community development activity in three diverse demonstration sites; Little Rock, New Orleans and Palm Beach county, the authors identify key elements of building social capital which strongly affect community development. Some of those elements identified are most characteristic of (what the authors refer to as) intermediate outcomes of community development interventions, including comprehension of community development, credibility of effort and participants, confidence, competence, and constructive critiques of efforts. The others are most relevant to program management and implementation and include communication among participants, congruence of program effort, management of inherent contradiction, and adjusting implementation to reflect local context. In conclusion, the book describes the limits and promise of building social capital. The LISC consensus organizing demonstration program experience (and the authors' exploration of its strengths and weaknesses) suggests that social capital construction is difficult and slow, but it is possible, and that good program design and implementation can cultivate an environment in which it will grow more rapidly that it would if there were no intervention. Its experience also confirms both the special difficulty of building social capital across lines of race and class, and the fact that is where need is greatest. Read More