We’ll contrast community development with a social services model, as both address in their own ways the overall health of communities, and quality of life issues. But often in pretty different ways, with respect to organization, process, timelines, and scope of participation of stakeholders (to name a few).

The two types of approaches can ‘complement’ each other. Community development approaches don’t have to ‘worry’ about basic service delivery programs, and can act as a ‘safety net’ where standard social services are lacking, inadequate. But they work better when the needs are smaller-scale and shorter-term (e.g., food bank boxes vs affordable housing). But even if public welfare programs are supposed to serve as safety nets, many people still fall through the cracks, and if the problem is serious and widespread enough and the strategies for identifying it within a community effective, CD projects can serve valuable functions, tangible and intangible.

For more information (than you probably want or need), refer to design principles (here is a summary page of some community development design principles).

Functions of community development

• Social safety net (addressing issues that social services programs don’t or can’t because of their narrow focus);
• Social conscience (fighting for issues of social justice–for instance making a community more handicap-accessible, or addressing difficult issues such as domestic violence);
• Advocacy (for instance, the ORA supported Measure 27 to label foods with genetically engineered organisms/components);
• Activism (the ORA’s water-billing project in Ontario included a request to change the wording in the city’s regulations about not having to provide residents with municipal water if they have had their water shut off at least twice for non-payment);
• Community participation (development organizations, especially to the extent they practice grassroots, ‘bottom-up’ development, have the potential to give voice to the powerless and disenfranchised, as well as other more privileged groups within the community);
• Address quality of life issues (social services models couldn’t, for instance, try to put pressure on local industrial polluters to clean up their act, or to pass an ordinance notifying neighbors when someone intends to spray toxic pesticides)

Understand the differences between a grassroots, bottom-up approach, versus a top-down, bureaucratic approach. It’s pretty difficult for a narrowly focused bureaucracy to address these kinds of multi-faceted issues, since in many cases in development work we don’t even know what the issues are until we do some grassroots inquiry and organizing.

Advantages and disadvantages

Community/policy approaches versus project/program approaches

• Integration, coordination
  • Social services can sometimes achieve coordination–for instance, here in La Grande now many of the social services are housed in one building, and the goal is better integration. With community development, because it is bottom-up, it’s sometimes difficult to plan because one never knows what sorts of problems people will identify as important, and as worthy of their efforts to address. However, community development can be integrated into an overall strategy at the community level, whereas social services programs are pretty much ‘one size fits all.’
• Flow of information
  • There are different kinds of information. Often times we value scientific information, especially when we’re trying to evaluate social services, or inform welfare policy, or look at economic or employment trends, crime rates, public school outcomes, etc.  Bottom-up approaches should be characterized by two-way flows of information-policymakers need to know what the people they purport to help are thinking, and people need to know what policies are, how to use them, etc. Ideally, policy reflects the needs both of funders and recipients. Social inequalities, to the extent they further separate the classes, make this more difficult.
  • Contrast this approach to welfare ‘reform.’ If the main intent is to reduce welfare rolls, without trying to address the reasons they are so difficult to reduce, the objective may be met, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that people will be better off as a result.
• Integration versus intervention
  • Social services programs can be integrated between themselves, but they are generally geared more towards intervention. Community development projects can be tailored to community needs as expressed by participants in planning processes and public meetings. They may recommend interventions of various sorts, but those interventions are proposed because they meet a community’s needs, not because they fit into a bureaucratic system of social welfare service.
• Scale
  • Social services models can be quite efficient here–as bureaucracies, they’re better set up to handle large numbers of clients. Community development can get quite messy as the size of the constituency increases.

What is social capital?

We know what human capital is, right? So what is social capital? Here are a few definitions:

It can refer to social organizations, existing networks of mutual aid, reciprocity, or to stocks of social trust, norms and networks that people can draw upon to solve common problems. As Sociologist Robert Putnam writes, think of it as a ‘favor bank’ upon which people in the network can draw. It is one way to think about the strength of social ties and networks and the kinds of benefits that social groups expect to get from these networks.

Can you think of examples of social capital that might operate in a community? Capital already built up by segments of a community that may be useful for development purposes. Remember how we discussed how women who had some social support systems seemed to be demonstrably better off, with respect to their need for welfare and their ability to get off of welfare, than those without? They’ve got social capital.

Welfare agencies often reward those with social capital (for instance, welfare reform tries to put children in parents’ or relatives’ homes), or another way of looking at it, those without social capital are punished. Chamber of commerce, various religious groups–EOU’s Haven from Hunger project and the kind of social capital that may operate between churches, food banks, non-profit organizations, etc.

According to sociologist James Coleman (1988), social capital fills a need within a society/social group, and is an economic adaptation (it’s functional-we’ve talked about the functional argument before). French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1995) contends that social capital is a function of economic organization, and thus that most social capital is a response-it may benefit those already in privileged positions, or it may be designed to address perceived inequities of some groups, but to understand it requires an examination of economic structures and capitalism.

Sociologist Robert Putnam (1995) refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. He focuses the idea of social capital on communities. His book, entitled ‘Bowling Alone (2000),’ discusses in depth the loss of social capital in communities across America. It must be kept in mind, however, that some social groups and some social capital works to the benefit of certain groups, at the expense of others.

What is a social network, or who’s in it? (people you know, who know you, presumably with a higher level of trust than members have with outsiders)-is social capital always beneficial (in other words, can it be used to exclude as well? At the extreme, would violent extremist groups like the KKK be considered a form of social capital)?

Examples from Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone

• When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye on one another’s homes, that’s social capital in action.
• When a tightly knit community of Hassidic Jews trade diamonds without having to test each gem for purity, that’s social capital in action (a high level of trust with tens of thousands of dollars worth of gems).
• Barn-raising on the American frontier;
• e-mail exchanges among members of a cancer support group;
• Social capital can be found in friendship networks, neighborhoods, churches, schools, bridge clubs, civic associations, and even bars-the motto in the TV show Cheers “where everybody knows your name” captures one important aspect of social capital.

How does social capital affect:

• information flows (e.g. learning about jobs, learning about candidates running for office, exchanging ideas at college, finding out what houses are available for rent or sale, who the ‘best’ professors or what the best classes are, etc.) depend on social capital
• norms of reciprocity (mutual aid) are dependent on social networks.
  • Bonding networks that connect folks who are similar, and can sustain reciprocity within a defined group.
  • Bridging networks that connect individuals who are diverse, and can sustain more generalized reciprocity between groups.
• Collective action depends upon social networks-action often draws upon existing networks and resources-why re-create the wheel (e.g., the role that the black churches played in the civic rights movement)? However, collective action also can foster new networks (for instance, when community development processes identify new problems and must bring together diverse groups to address them).
• Broader identities and solidarity are encouraged by social networks that help translate an “I” mentality into a “we” mentality.

You should think about what kinds of social capital could be useful for addressing hunger or food-related issues in La Grande, for instance, or even what kind of social capital might be harmful to community development efforts. Understand how social capital is in a sense a corollary to human capital-but it works at a collective level. We know how individuals invest in human capital-that’s pretty easy to decipher. There is less agreement about where social capital comes from, but considerable agreement that it can be used to help communities, social groups, etc., address problems. How does social capital manifest itself on campus, in your own community?

So, we know what human capital is, and how it is presumed to benefit people. How does social capital fit into this understanding?

What can we do to help facilitate development of social capital? (first, do we need to learn how it works?)

Any dangers associated with social capital (its use to further parochial interests, when a minority is well-organized and able to ‘outflank’ a majority)? How about using neighborhood groups to spy on suspicious immigrant groups?

Is the relationship between politicians and corporate America an example of social capital? What are some of the forms?

• Lobbying networks
• Political campaign donation networks
• Think tanks (designed to create policy bases that are friendly to certain political interests)

Who’s likely left out in this equation?

Development biases: Putting the last first (more ‘bottom-up’ approaches)

In Robert Chambers’ 1984 book, Rural Development: Putting the Last First, he discusses how development is often ‘biased’ against those hardest to reach. In other words, the kinds of problems development can address are limited to those expressed by the easiest to reach. Annie talked about how difficult it is, for instance, to go out and find migrant workers to talk to. This is the same dynamic at work. Some of the biases include:

• ‘Tarmac’–in other words, the further away from the tarmac (the runway or the airport), the less the chances that one’s views will be heard or incorporated;
• Urban/rural–there are many ways that development is biased in favor of urban areas. With respect to political representation, there are more votes to be had in larger areas. There are more doctors, more specialists, more services in general, more entertainment, better transportation, better access to a wide variety of goods and services, etc.
• Tourism–when development workers do ‘tours’ of poverty-stricken areas, for instance, who do they see? In some cases, they see who the locals, or who local officials, want them to see. The showcases, or the opinion leaders, but maybe not the ones who are rarely heard from.
• Off the beaten path–once out in the bush, or even in the city, the further away from main thoroughfares, commercial centers, etc., the less likely are one’s chances of being heard.
• Household differences–are single mothers as likely to be represented as others? They may be at work, doing a child care run, etc., or just may not have the time to provide input.
• Meeting biases–who can make it, who can’t? Who’s more likely to miss meetings and why? Does the time in which meetings are held (e.g., after dinner) make a difference in who can attend?
• Linguistic, cultural, ethnic and racial biases–who feels welcome at the table?

The point is that it is difficult to elicit participation, broad-based participation, and takes a great deal of work. Yet community development, grassroots community development anyway, depends on this process. As the saying goes, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’–if the information on which you’re basing policy was collected haphazardly, or perhaps even to misrepresent some people’s views what’s likely to come of it won’t be a clear picture of reality. For instance, the way that the sampling of homeless populations was done for the last two censuses has underrepresented their numbers, which has budget implications for cities trying to address the problem (censuses of population are critical to how resources are allocated).

Social capital is not a cure-all. There is a dark side. The Ku Klux Klan is a pretty stark example. Many civic clubs in the 1960s and even later excluded women, even though important business decisions were being made in these settings. The Augusta National Golf Course in Georgia is a contemporary example–its members are powerful, rich and influential, and were all male (until 2012). Does business get conducted in such settings? The proverbial good ol’ boy networks may work against others’ interests. While they may be useful for getting things done, they may also facilitate development for some at the expense of others. Thus an important element of bottom-up community development, along with broad-based participation, is transparency. However, if we don’t take a grassroots approach, many times we risk subverting traditional roles of social capital that could prove quite useful, and replacing them with top-down versions that may not work very well.

Sources

• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. The Forms of Capital. Chapter 9 in JG Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Greenwood Press.
• Chambers, Robert. 1984. Rural Development: Putting the Last First. New York: Longman.
• Coleman, James. 1988. Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology94 (supplement), s95-s120.
• Putnam, R. 1995. Bowling Alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy. 6,1 (Jan): 65-78.
• Putnam, R. 1995. Bowling Alone. NY: Simon and Schuster.