A national leader in the field of civic participation and community change, Everyday Democracy helps people of different backgrounds and views talk and work together to solve problems and create communities that work for everyone. Using innovative, participatory approaches, Everyday Democracy works with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states. It also runs the The Issue Guide Exchange, a free, online resource available to anyone who is interested in broad-based, inclusive dialogue leading to community action, where people share, create, and discuss dialogue materials.

Its online handbook, The Basics of Dialogue to Change, which is adapted from its 157-page guide Organizing Community-wide Dialogue for Action and Change (available in pdf for free), covers these topics:

• Overview
• Getting Started
• Building a Team
• Planning Communications
• Budget and Fundraising
• Documentation and Evaluation
• Recruiting Participants
• Recruiting Facilitators
• Planning the Kickoff
• Sites and Logistics
• Holding the First Round
• Planning for Action

IssueLab archives, distributes, and promotes the research produced by nonprofits. It archives hard-to-find research from small community-based organizations as well as large think tanks. Here are some research papers in its Community Development selection.

Demonstrating Our Values, Impact and Effectiveness: Final Report of the NeighborWorks Community Organizing Pilot Program. Contributing Organization(s): Neighborworks America

Intersection: Taking it to the Street. Contributing Organization(s): The McKnight Foundation

Resident Involvement in Community Change: The Experiences of Two Initiatives. Contributing Organization(s): Public/Private Ventures

Resident Participation: A Community-Building Strategy in Low-Income Neighborhoods. Contributing Organization(s): Neighborworks America

The Best of Both: Community Colleges and Community-Based Organizations Partner to Better Serve Low-Income Workers and Employers. Contributing Organization(s): Public/Private Ventures

Shinichi Murota Doshisha University, Japan

• Make the Road NY is probably the most active and powerful grassroots organization in NYC today.
• Time’s Up is a bicycle rider’s organization whose activity is basically a public ride to advocate for greener streets and riders friendly urban planning.
• Common Ground is a famous community development project for homeless. Their approach is not quite “social work” per say, but they have made some impacts in the community.

Ben MacConnell, Direct Action & Research Training Center

• DART just posted a new video on community organizing. It also serves as decent intro for a new observer, so I thought it may be of use to you.

David William Rothwell

• I recently watched a panel discussion on the Community Reinvestment Act that is posted on UNC Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Any community practice effort should be informed of the CRA. (Note: This is an iTunes movie and may require you to open iTunes to play the movie. Try various browsers if one fails.)

Rich Wood – Lots of resources via PICO website as well, some written some video, see:

• http://www.organizingcareers.org/videos?id=0001
• http://www.piconetwork.org/congregations/reflections
• http://www.cofionline.org/about_cofi.php?id=29

Dick Schoech, UT Arlington

• Online Volunteering
• Building Enduring Communities: Development, property management, and residence- and community-based human services, nonprofit affordable housing social services.
• The Charlie Rose show has great interviews with current thinkers and doers. For example, this conversation with Michael Milken & Muhammad Yunus about World poverty.
• Tracy J. Browns explains the Nine Essential Internal Controls that every Faith Based or Community Organization must have.
• Circles of Caring
• The Secret to Getting Things Right (audio) How did the humblest tool for organizing data reduce complications in surgical practice, streamline restaurant operations, and minimize the risks of venture capital? An hour with Harvard Medical School professor Atul Gawande, author of “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”. I found the discussion very relevant since human services folks routinely handle a lot of complex situations. Almost all the conclusions on the failure to prevent child abuse by CPS come to a failure to do things due to fatigue, lack of training, etc. We could use more checklists in our field to insure we get things right.

Videos Not Online

Elizabeth Beck

• I use something called Holding Ground about Dudley Street or Streets of Hope to show Rothman’s three approaches,
• I use Bill Moyers interview with Myles Horton (vol 2) to show community participation, adult education and pedagogy of the oppressed
• I use a Philip Randolph which is 90 minutes called something like Jobs and Freedom to show among others things coalition building.

Christina Erickson

• A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay
• Unnatural Causes
• The story of stuff [also on youtube]

Nicole Nicotera, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver

• I like to use Holding Ground about the Dudley Street neighborhood initiative near Boston MA.
• There is also a book about their process called, Streets of Hope by Medoff and Sklar (1994) South End Press.
• Another DVD that may be useful, but I have not used in class myself is called “I am a Promise.”

Karen Gray, Asst Professor, OU-Tulsa School of Social Work, Tulsa, OK 74135

• From the bottom up
• The fire next time
• Recruiting new members
• It was a wonderful life
• Building hope
• The Forgotten Americans
• Eyes on the Prize: Bridge to Freedom
• Bread and Roses
• Holding Ground
• The Democratic Promise

Dick Schoech, UT Arlington

• The Heart of Bassett Place: W. Gertrude Brown and the Wheatley House. Historical.
• Case study of community practice in an African-American community.
• Running Good Meetings (12 minutes) A humorous overview the basics of running meetings.
• Bill Moyers interview with Ernie Cortez, a community organizer in San Antonio, TX
• Mobilizing Community Assets. Kretzmann, J, & McKnight, J. (1993), the only video I know that argues that you have to take a capacity building approach to community practice to be effective.
• The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and his Legacy. 50 min.
• The Deming of America: Interview with TQM founder E. Deming TQM as presented by its founder is very applicable to the human services.

Others mentioned

• Fight in the Fields is a great movie for teaching organizing
• One night of fire about activists creating an underground street party in nyc.
• Thirst
• Shape of Water
• Twilight LA
• This black soil
• The Milagro Bean Field War
• Bullfrog films has a number of good ones. “The Philadelphia Story“, looks promising.

The process planner will suggest a list of methods. It is often a good idea to combine different methods at different stages of a decision making cycle.

You can choose between the following options:

1. The full version of the process planner contains both short online questionnaires and supporting text to help you think through the options available to you. We recommend this for new users.

2. The quick version of the process planner is limited to just the questionnaires. Choosing this option means you will be able to choose a method quicker but you will not have access to the useful supporting information. This option is mainly for advanced users.

3. The supporting information pages where you can view the guidance on planning participation processes without having to click through the questionnaires. This option will not help you choose a method.

4. To find suitable methods you can also use the methods advanced search .

If you are unable to find what you are looking for elsewhere on the site you can post a question for our experts to respond to.

from Public Participation Process Planner via people and participation.net – the public participation public engagement website. People & Participation is based on Involve’s successful book (pdf) by the same name which was launched in 2005. The book provides a useful summary of participatory methods and practice but given the number of methods and speed of the development of new methods it is impossible for a printed publication to stay accurate for long. The reason for transferring People & Participation to the web is to allow us to maintain more, and more up to date information about participation. It also allows use as the site user to add your knowledge and experience making the site a truly collaborative experience, something that a book simply cannot do.

• Questions to ask before you begin
• Planning how you will use community empowerment tools
• About our list of community empowerment methods
• Consultation methods
• Participatory techniques
• Scrutiny methods
• Other useful methods

from Practical ways to engage with your community via Improvement and Development Agency for local government (IDeA). The IDeA supports improvement and innovation in local government, focusing on the issues that are important to councils and using tried and tested ways of working.

10 Reasons To Have a Block Party

1. To have fun – no excuse or reason to celebrate!
2. To meet your neighbors.
3. To increase the sense of belonging in your neighborhood.
4. To organize a city-sponsored group such as Neighborhood Watch.
5. To make connections within the community. When you know people, you can exchange skills or resources and perhaps organize a book club, baby-sitting co-op, share walking to school duties, or find new friends for your children.
6. To plan a campaign for traffic slowdown, get better lighting, or address other interests.
7. To “use” the street for one day, for example to roller blade, set up a kids jump house or to practice bike safety skills.
8. To meet some of the old-time residents in the neighborhood and learn about its history.
9. To have a neighborhood clean-up day, play some good music and barbecue once all the work is done.
10. To start a tradition of getting together at least once a year.

How to start organizing

• Gather a few neighbors and divide up the tasks. A block party is too big a production for even the most highly-skilled organizer to accomplish alone. If you don’t already know you neighbors, reach out to them by organizing an introductory meeting and planning session.
• Decide on a possible theme, activities, etc. Decide what to do about food.
• Start knocking on doors to find out if there is enough interest and, if so, which day would be the best for the most people
• Pick a date and time (mid-afternoon to evening works best). Respect neighborhood quietness after 9:00pm. Think of an alternate plan in case of poor weather.
• Go door to door. Hand out invitations. If you plan to close off the street, you’ll probably need to complete Block Party application form.
• Recruit volunteers to help with the planning.
• Decide if this will be a block party restricted to those on the street/block or will people be able to invite friends/relatives
• Post signs the day before reminding everyone to remove cars and that the street will be closed.

Ideas

• Invite a city council member, school principal, or city staff member.
• Call the Police Department, Fire Department, Environmental Services or other city departments to obtain literature, give-aways, or to request a presentation.
• Make a record of everyone who attends and everyone you contacted; after all, the idea of a block party is to connect neighbors.
• Identify special talents your neighbors might have – you may be living next to a magician, singer, dancer, artist, radio host or prize winning cook.
• Plan lots of activities for children.
• Food: if you’re looking for the least fuss, work, and cleanup, the hot dog is for you. The standard charcoal grill is a cheap, easy, portable way to go. Someone on your block probably owns one if you don’t.
• Lots of block parties have great luck getting food donated from local grocery stores or supermarkets.
• Have an environmentally friendly party. Ask everyone to bring their own reusable plates, cups and cutlery to limit paper garbage and litter.
• Include activities that encourage people to meet each other. Use nametags and include children by asking them to create the tags.
• Make sure that people with disabilities can participate in the activities and include their attendants (those with seeing eye dogs or in wheelchairs).
• Institute a bathroom policy “Everyone to use their own” so that home security is maintained.
• Trash: have at least one trash can at every table/location where food is being served. It’s also a good idea to have several elsewhere on the block.
• Inspire clean up after every party by rewarding children with a prize for packing up garbage.
• Have a block/street clean up as part of the party. Also, neighbors may want to contribute towards the cost of a truckload to the dump and use this to clean out gardens, garbage or alleys.
• Distribute an evaluation form to participants (to get a good response, number the forms and have door prizes for returned entries).

Getting to know your neighbors

• Identify any special people that lived in your area such as the longest resident, politician, artist, eccentric, hero, etc. Have partygoers guess who, what, where through charades and other games.
• Have everyone bring his or her favorite family dish.
• Use a map to indicate where everyone originally came from.

Family-friendly activities

• Water balloon or egg toss
• Hide and seek
• Face painting
• Organize a kids talent show or parade
• Sidewalk chalk
• Pictionary or charades
• Musical chairs
• Invite a clown, balloon artist or magician
• Rent a popcorn or snow cone machine

Neighborhood action

• Discuss what issues/concerns people may have (keep this to a predetermined time: remember, a block party should be fun).
• Establish teams to explore how to resolve the concerns.
• Have a clean-up time.
• Build a bench, plant a garden, and paint street numbers, etc. as part of the block party activities.

Typical restrictions

• Alcohol is only permitted on private property, not on city streets or in parks.
• Residents should observe security precautions, for example lock back doors to houses and keep equipment in sight.
• Food cannot be sold on city streets unless the proper permits have been obtained. Give the food away (and there’s nothing to stop you from putting a “suggested donation” sign on the table).
• Loud amplification of music is prohibited.
• If you set up tables and chairs on the street, leave room for emergency vehicles.

Other resources:

• Block Party Checklist from Neighbors Project
• Have a Street Party (from Streets Alive)

Home Office Research, Development & Statistics Directorate (December 2004)

Website: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/hors289.pdf

Improvement & Development Agency (July 2005)

This article examines the concept of the ’sustainable community’, and asks how much of the debate is about hot air, and how much is about clean air and considers how much is about building civic empires rather than green environments?

Website: http://www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=919821

Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (2004)

This guide is for residents, community representatives and practitioners who are delivering regeneration programmes at the local level, in Area Based Initiatives (ABIs) and other regeneration areas.

Website: http://www.crimereduction.org.uk/activecommunities/activecommunities73.htm

Paul Henderson (April 2003)

This publication from the Combined European Bureau for Social Development (CEBSD), explores how and why tools and techniques for participation seem to have become part of a common European culture. There is a powerful note of caution on how “they can be counter-productive to the very processes of empowerment and learning that are at the heart of community development”.

Website: www.cebsd.org/social_resource.htm

CommuniTIES

bassac (2005)

Communities is essential reading for anyone with a stake in creating positive social change in the UK. The publication unveils what, to date, has been the largely invisible impact of bassac members and other community-based organisations.

Website: www.bassac.org.uk/uploads/File/Communities(1).pdf

The Scottish Centre for Regeneration offer a useful online guide to those involved in community work.

Website: http://www.ce.communitiesscotland.gov.uk/stellent/groups/public/documents/webpages/scrcs_006693.hcsp

Christine Sylvest Larsen (October 2004)

This paper provides practical guidance for practitioners and policy makers on how to get the community involved. It draws on the review ‘What works in community involvement in Area Based Initiatives (ABIs)’, which was commissioned by the Home Office to evaluate the impact of community involvement in ABIs.

Website: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/dpr27.pdf

Tom Bentley, Helen McCarthy, Melissa Mean (February 2003)

This report from think-tank Demos suggests that community-based organisations could be damaged by attempts to co-opt them as instruments of government policy.

Website: www.demos.co.uk/files/insideout.pdf

(October 2002)

The standards provide a tool for promoting and practising good quality community development learning and practice.

Website: http://www.cdx.org.uk/national-occupational-standards-nos-for-community-development-work

IACD Global

A guide from the International Association for Community Development (IACD).

Website: http://www.iacdglobal.org/en/publications/iacd-publications/what-community-development-does-short-guide-decision-makers-how-it-ac

(January 2007)

International Association of Community Development collected case studies and information on community development, to promote learning and exchange of experiences.

Website: www.iacdglobal.org/projects.htm

Community capacity: the interaction of human capital, organizational resources, and social capital existing within a given community that can be leveraged to solve collective problems and improve or maintain the well-being of that community. It may operate through informal social processes and/or organized efforts by individuals, organizations and social networks. (Chaskin, Brown, Venkatesh & Vidal, 2001).

The key features of communities with capacity are a sense of community among residents, a commitment by residents to organize and act to improve the community, an ability to act to solve problems, and access to resources within and beyond the community.

Because residents are the core of a community’s assets, they represent the first level in the ecology of community change. As both agents and beneficiaries of community change, they can play a central role in shaping, implementing, and sustaining the change agenda. In many low-income communities, however, residents lack opportunities and support for those roles. Efforts by recent community-change ventures to increase residents’ capacity involve developing them as leaders, creating social connections, and organizing people to participate in change.

Developing Leaders

Our definition and discussion of leadership development draws heavily from a recent publication on community capacity (Chaskin, Brown,Venkatesh & Vidal, 2001), which describes the following characteristics: [Leadership development] attempts to engage the participation and commitment of current and potential leaders, provide them with opportunities for building skills, connect them to new information and resources, enlarge their perspectives on their community and how it might change, and help them create new relationships.

Methods range from formal training programs, which convey information or develop particular skills, to on-the-job training in which participants become members of boards or planning teams, serve in apprenticeships or co-staffing positions, and receive coaching or other training that prepares them to assume new roles. These approaches can be used to cultivate individual leaders or cadres of individuals who can participate in any stage of the community-change process: developing the overall vision, creating the plan for change, performing activities to implement the plan, tracking progress, and spreading the news about results.

It is essential to examine the community’s existing leadership structures—both informal and formal—carefully.

Their dynamics and subtleties are hard for outsiders to grasp easily. Without deep knowledge of the local context, it can be difficult to identify and work with local leaders. Often, however, community building initiatives select residents to participate on governance boards or in leadership training programs without knowing whether they are actually connected to appropriate constituencies or whether other neighborhood stakeholders will view them as legitimate.

Moreover, the relative strengths and weaknesses of old and new leaders present both assets and challenges. Existing leaders can bring credibility, experience, and extensive relationship networks to the table, but they also may suspect the motives and abilities of new leaders and jealously guard their “turf.”New leaders contribute fresh ideas and energy and can increase the total number of leaders involved, but their skills may take time and resources to develop. Community change efforts that do not recognize these dynamics risk creating conflict, failing to maximize the strengths of local leaders, and losing residents’ willingness to make genuine investments in the initiative.

Participation in an initiative by local leaders does not always guarantee that neighborhood views receive respect.

Many of the technical skills required to improve housing, economic opportunities, and other program areas do not exist in communities depleted by long-term disinvestment. But when outside experts come in to help, residents sometimes feel that their own leadership skills have been discounted.

Overwhelmed by professional service providers or community development practitioners, residents can fall silent and allow others to make the decisions. Successful community building assumes that the outside expert’s role is to share knowledge so that good decisions are made, but not to make the decisions.

Simply giving residents leadership roles, without training or follow-up, does not necessarily produce effective or powerful leaders.

According to several initiative directors, residents need extra support to help them stay at the table effectively: “They need the pre-meeting meeting that helps them develop their strategies, and then they need the post-meeting meetings to help them debrief and compare perspectives.”

One way to develop local leaders is to give residents jobs as staff or board members. Often, however, the residents placed in those positions serve only as outreach workers or in roles for which they are not initially qualified. They may not receive the training or opportunities they need to develop competent leadership skills or to move up within the organization.

Formal training for local leaders—on how to run meetings or monitor agency spending, for example—is difficult to do well, however. Classes are an efficient way to share information and skills, but they can seem abstract, leaving residents feeling lost, and they often fail to provide adequate follow-up.

Leadership development appears to be more successful when it comes as part of the process of addressing goals. As one technical assistance provider explained, “Rather than doing board training about board-staff relations, we did it around the hiring of an executive director, which was the task of the moment. Or we gave them financial training when we needed to build a budget.”

The idea of “becoming leaders through the work” resonates with many residents; it is an approach that builds confidence and generates positive relationships among people who share a common goal. However, it is challenging to implement because it requires professional staff to consider everything on two levels: how to get the task done and how to exploit the task’s teaching potential.

Some organizations have made serious commitments to developing resident leaders on the job, even if it means slowing down the pace of production, with an eye toward ultimately decreasing reliance on people from outside the community. One organization, for example, raised funds so that residents on staff could get the education they needed to take over leadership responsibilities from the non-resident professional staff; now, 60 of 75 staff are lifetime neighborhood residents.

Leadership development is an ongoing, intentional process.

The local leadership base rarely stays stable over time. Individuals burn out, move into positions of higher authority, or leave the community, creating a constant pressure to replenish the leadership base. It takes continuous investment and commitment to make sure that new leaders develop and find roles to fill, even if existing leaders fail to step aside.

Coming up:

Creating social connections
Mobilizing people to participate in community change

Click here for more from Voices from the Field

from Community Change: Theories, Practice, and Evidence (pdf). Amie M. Schuck and Dennis P. Rosenbaum. Edited by Karen Fulbright-Anderson and Patricia Auspos. The Aspen Institute.

The community policing era, roughly 1970 to the present, is arguably only the third period in the history of American police reform, following the political era, 1840s–1920s, and the reform era, 1920s–1960s. Emerging from the ashes of the urban riots of the 1960s and from the failure of urban police to develop meaningful and respectful relationships with African-American neighborhoods, community policing was an attempt to recognize and respond to the needs of the community. The debate over the definition of community policing has been contentious at times, and police departments have implemented hundreds of diverse programs under this one label. Nevertheless, there is some agreement in the literature about common elements.

Community policing can be distinguished along four basic dimensions: philosophical, strategic, tactical, and organizational. At the philosophical level, community policing encourages strong citizen input into police decision making, and offers a broader view of the police function that extends beyond crime fighting to solving problems, preventing crime, and generally improving the quality of neighborhood life. Citizen input in the form of advisory boards, community meetings, and surveys is encouraged. Citizens are expected to have some say in the prioritization of neighborhood problems, the deployment of police resources, and the type of policing they will receive.

At the strategic level, community policing often results in a reorientation of street-level operations to increase face-to-face contact between police and citizens, such as more foot patrol, door-to-door contacts, and community meetings. Other operational changes include geographic-based deployment of personnel, which requires individual and group responsibility for smaller geographic areas on a 24-hour basis rather than larger areas for an eight- to ten-hour shift.

One component of this new emphasis on place rather than time is the use of permanent assignments. The potential benefits of this approach are many: Officers and citizens become familiar with one another, begin to develop trust, and establish the basis for a mutually respectful working relationship. Other benefits include officers’ increased knowledge of local problems, troublemakers, and resources. While permanent beat assignments are very popular among citizens, they are problematic for the police. Officers are promoted to new assignments or elect to move elsewhere. As officers become more familiar with the neighborhood, the risk of police corruption increases, although good supervision can be preventative. As a result of these and other problems, permanent assignments are difficult to implement. Ultimately, responsibility for neighborhoods occurs at the command level. At a minimum, to address the problem of officers being unfamiliar with the neighborhoods and the residents they police, many cities are establishing residency requirements. Requiring that officers live within the city boundaries will help, but in larger cities, this will not solve the problem at the level of beat assignment. Officers are likely to live and work in different places.

Community policing at the strategic level also includes an emphasis on preventing crime and solving neighborhood problems. This model encourages police officers to go beyond responding to individual incidents and taking reports to address underlying problems and conditions in the neighborhood. This requires careful problem analysis, good data, and community involvement. Community policing could involve a new relationship between police and youth—one not based on conflict and hostility. For younger children, police can serve as mentors and role models. For adolescents, police can begin to bridge the gap by facilitating an open dialogue about concerns and prejudices.

At the tactical level, where philosophies and strategies are translated into real action, community policing can take on many faces. In addition to creating more opportunities for positive interaction with citizens (which requires the police to get out of their cars), community policing calls for mobilizing citizens, building partnerships with other organizations, and engaging in systematic problem solving. In the more progressive police departments, mobilization and problem solving are intimately linked, and the long-term goal is to establish self-regulating neighborhoods.

Smart community-oriented police organizations do not define their range of partnerships exclusively in terms of total community membership (e.g., Neighborhood Watch) or total law enforcement membership (e.g., FBI-DEA­local police task force). They recognize that linkages must be created with other institutions and agencies (ranging from local churches to other city departments) to leverage resources for local problems. These smart police organizations recognize something that traditional police agencies do not, namely, that the police alone cannot achieve public safety.

Finally, community policing can be conceptualized as a series of potential changes at the organizational level. Various changes within the police organization are considered necessary to achieve a new style of policing at the neighborhood level. Among these are: (1) changes in organizational structure, decentralizing, flattening, creating teams, and civilianizing, (2) changes in management, a mission statement that reflects new policing values, strategic planning, supervisory coaching and mentoring, and empowering of officers, (3) changes in information management to establish new systems for evaluating personnel, units, and programs, and new systems for crime analysis, mapping, and resource deployment. Whether new information technology will be used to further the goals of community policing or to move policing in another direction remains to be seen.

How effective?

Is community policing effective and beneficial for neighborhoods? The jury is still out, and the evaluation findings to date have been mixed. Some reasonably good evidence suggests that community-policing tactics can reduce fear of crime, improve police-community relations, and stimulate more positive attitudes among police personnel. We have less evidence that community policing can reduce levels of crime and disorder or change the actual behavior of citizens or police. As an exception, one of the more rigorous evaluations has shown positive results in Chicago neighborhoods on many of these outcomes. [ed: for a more recent evaluation, see  Community Policing in Chicago - An Evaluation of Chicago's Alternative Policing Strategy]

Community policing is attractive in theory, but has faced an uphill battle to convince police officers and citizens to accept new roles and responsibilities. Despite these constraints, many determined police executives and community leaders have persisted in their reform efforts and, consequently, have recorded some notable successes. The larger problem lies in the changing landscape of policing and the challenge posed by competing paradigms.

Community policing offers a real solution to this growing problem. Joint police-community problem-solving initiatives—with open, two-way communication and a focus on building comprehensive partnerships that attack the problem from all sides—hold considerable promise. This approach has been effective in addressing other social problems, and there is no compelling reason to believe that it cannot be applied to the problem of public safety.

Related resources:
DOJ Office of Community Oriented Policing
Center for Problem-Oriented Policing