“whole community organizing” for the 21 st century

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Community DevelopmentSociety. JournalPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcod19

“Whole CommunityOrganizing” for the 21St

CenturyStephen Aigner a , Victor Raymond b & Lois Smidt ca North Central Regional Center for RuralDevelopment , Iowa State Universityb Department of Sociology , Iowa State Universityc Beyond Welfare , Ames, IowaPublished online: 09 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: Stephen Aigner , Victor Raymond & Lois Smidt (2002) “WholeCommunity Organizing” for the 21St Century, Community Development Society.Journal, 33:1, 86-106

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Journal of the Community Development Society Vol. 33 No. 1 2002

"WHOLE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING"

FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

By Stephen M. Aigner, Victor J. Raymond, and Lois J. Smidt

ABSTRACT Two elements constitute the core meaning of community—face-to-face social interactions and social relationships. The global era of the 21s" century presents new challenges to the practice of community change that empowers a community. McKnight articulates a model of community practice, "whole community organizing" which addresses the core elements of community: social interactions and relationships. We believe this new approach to community change and empowerment answers the challenges of the 21s" century. This article first reviews frequently-cited frameworks of approaches to community change and empowerment as well as the dilemmas and contradictions those interventions pose. We then briefly review asset-based community development from the "inside out" and present whole community organizing, weighing its strengths against dilemmas and contradictions of obsolete frameworks. Finally, we introduce empirical support from our own work that compares and analyzes communities' strategies to transform their social relationships, their economies, and their communities.

Keywords: asset-based community development, community, community transformation, organizing, participation, acting locally

I N T R O D U C T I O N On the threshold of the 21sl century, we encounter many critical

modifiers of community. However, as we reflect on what it means to say that a community is counterfeit, imagined, or virtual, we rediscover that face-to-face social interactions shape community identities and communal relationships. From our social interactions and our relationships, we interpret community and derive a sense of belonging, informed by what is familiar, what seems safe, and what is shared. What we mean by community depends upon the historical and spatial context of our everyday lives.

Stephen Aigner is Senior Fellow with the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development and Associate Professor of Sociology, Iowa State University. Victor Raymond, also a former community organizer, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, Iowa State University. Lois Smidt is a community "transformer" and Executive Director of Beyond Welfare, Ames, Iowa.

We appreciate the substantive and editorial contributions of C. D. Anderson, J. Erlich, C. B. Flora, J. Flora, M. Green, J. Kretzmann, J. McKnight, J. Rothman, J. Tropman, T. Walz, the Journal's editor, T. Bradshaw, special issue editor, R. Hustcdde, and three anonymous reviewers. Please direct your correspondence to S. Aigner, saigner(ajiastate.edu.

CO 2002, The Community Development Society

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Aigner, Raymond and Smidt 87

Within the context of an industrializing and an urbanizing European landscape, Toennies (1957 [1887]) rooted the now famous concept of the traditional community, Gemeinschaft, in the natural soil of place, family, and kin. Toennies also expressed a dissenting preference for the social relationships of Gemeinschaft over modernity's exchange and commodifying relationships of Gesellschaft. Durkheim (1964 [1893]) analyzed the division of labor and social solidarity and enriched the notion of the traditional community, emphasizing the strong ties of mechanical solidarity, i.e., the tightly knit bonds between members, groups, and cohesive communities.

Now, within the context of a global economy, social theorist Brint (2000, pp. 1-3) revisits Gemeinschaft, giving emphasis to the power of community as a "symbol and an aspiration":

"[Community] suggests many appealing features of human social relationships—sense of familiarity and safety, mutual concern and support, continuous loyalties, even the possibility of being appreciated for one's full personality and contribution to group life rather than for narrower aspects of rank and achievement."

Further, Brint (2000, p. 3) observes that, "Subsequent writers either romanticize community or they debunk community." Nevertheless, after a critical review of research within the "communities studies" tradition since Toennies and Durkheim, Brint categorizes communities into several structurally distinct subtypes on the existential basis of relationship ties and the reason for and the frequency of social interactions. Thus, after more than a century, the original two dimensions of community—the basis for relationships and the nature of social interaction— still govern contemporary theoretical considerations and the public discourse of what community means.

The global era and the re-emergence of concern for local communities and peripheral places also has spurred community development scholars to re-examine the theoretical and research bases of community development, and attend with determination to the issues of community members, citizen participation, collective action, and community agency (Blakely, 1989; Lacy, 2000; Luloff & Swanson, 1995; Swanson, 2001; Wilkinson, 1989). Practitioners Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) concentrated on the challenge for communities to "think globally and act locally." Systematically and extensively, they investigated the efforts of local neighborhoods and communities to analyze inductively "what works" to improve a community and "why it works." Kretzmann and McKnight distilled, documented, and disseminated materials on the steps "to build communities from the inside out." They documented the steps successful grassroots community groups follow, and their book has become the best selling community development book ever published. The asset-based community development (ABCD) approach, as the Kretzmann and McKnight collaboration has come to be known, has garnered the attention of community residents and practitioners throughout the world.

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8 8 Journal of the Community Development Society

In this article we set in context the next phase of ABCD practice and examine what McKnight has called whole community organizing. Synthesizing elements from models of social planning, direct action, and locality development with the contours of emergent practices, McKnight (2001) has extracted and articulated the elements of community practice from a decade of using the asset-based community development approach. We believe whole community organizing has the potential to supplant 20"' century frameworks of community practice and to guide community practice within the context of the 21s t century.

In order to demonstrate the substantial contribution of whole community organizing, we first review several prior approaches to community empowerment (Rothman, 1995; Christenson, 1989; Hanna & Robinson, 1994) and focus on insights, dilemmas, contradictions, and lacunae. Then we present the principles McKnight (2001) presents as whole community organizing for the 21st century, and revisit the insights, dilemmas, contradictions, and lacunae of 20"' century frameworks for community change and empowerment. Next, we examine the congruence of whole community organizing with theoretical developments about community. Finally, we introduce empirical support from our own work that compares and analyzes communities' strategies to transform their social relationships, their economies, and their communities.

FRAMEWORKS FOR COMMUNITY PRACTICE Scholars and practitioners such as Rothman (1995), Christenson (1989)

and Hanna and Robinson (1994) identify three approaches to community change and transformation that each tap similar underlying dimensions of change. Drawing from the literature of community practitioners in primarily urban or international settings, Rothman (1995) organizes approaches to "deliberative, purposive" community change into three modalities: social planning/policy, social action, and locality development.' Christenson (1989), a rural sociologist, analyzed 300 articles selected from the Journal of the Community Development Society and major texts from the 1970s and 1980s to differentiate a similar breakdown into three classes: (1) self-help (including the non-directive, or cooperative approaches); (2) technical assistance and planning; and (3) conflict and confrontation.2 Hanna and Robinson (1994) investigated the world of grass roots community organizing and non-academic social change training academies for several years "to map the terrain of social change practices." They describe their result, three primary strategies or social change approaches, as strategic "highways with secondary and tertiary branches": traditional politics, direct action community organizing, and transformative social change.3

In each framework, the dimension of power underlies the progression from the traditional approach to change to the transformative vision that leads to empowerment. Designated leaders, who "know" what people want and need, direct the top-down flow of resources from the center to the periphery. When interest groups disagree on policy goals, they organize resources, especially

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Aigner, Raymond and Smidt 8')

numbers of people, to induce or coerce those protecting the status quo to change the agenda set by those in control. In situations where there is little, if any, agreement on goals, grassroots people on the margins need to take care of themselves, develop their own resources, take initiative, and raise their voices to transform the structure and processes of decision-making to include everyone.

INSIGHTS, DILEMMAS, CONTRADICTIONS, AND LACUNAE

Rothman contributes an important insight to the literature of community practice. The modalities of social planning, social action, and locality development are not "discrete categories." More like dominant motifs, Rothman underscores that in practice the three approaches are mixed and blended. For example, neighborhood block clubs and the United Farm Workers Union present elements of locality development and social action, although in different proportions. For a decade or more, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (Medoff & Sklar, 1994) illustrates the constant need to blend and mix the three modes of intervention.

Rothman offers a second, even more critical insight: within each modality lies a basic dilemma or challenge. Efforts to develop a locality focus on forming horizontal links between people, groups, and associations. The resources of horizontal links often fall short. Local projects may have to develop vertical links with external resources that may dilute and prevail over horizontal links. Community developers are hard put to choose; either option, whether to rely on horizontal links only or to link vertically to external resources, seems undesirable. Interventions designed to introduce social planning are beset with the challenge of substantively involving residents in making decisions. In choosing coercive, constraining strategies to exercise influence (Gamson, 1968), organizers face the dilemma of choosing moderate or more extreme social/direct action or direct action interventions. If the strategies and tactics are more radical and less conventional, then social action groups may lose support from those in the broader base whose backing they had hoped to win. Yet, those may be just the strategies and tactics the situation requires.

Social planners face the dilemma of fostering real participation in decision-making and stretching the time horizon, or facilitating token resident participation and finishing the project more quickly. Christenson (1989) considers that whatever concern staff may express on behalf of individual participation is mere tokenism. In fact, others analyze technical assistance more strongly (Fear et al., 1989). When institutional auspices impose technical assistance, technology, information, or ways of thinking on a community to meet a need or perform a need assessment, yet ignore local values and preferences, then local people do not develop their capacity for collective problem-solving. Such approaches of top-down technical assistance to community change focus on needs, needs assessments, and problem solving. Thus, the approach of using technical assistance not only fails to build local capacity, it may weaken the community's

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90 Journal of the Community Development Society

capacity for development and change. What Rothman first sees as a dilemma, Christenson considers a contradiction. Either top-down social planning or technical assistance may lead to substantial change in the community, but neither approach builds the local capacity of the community.4

The choice of a particular social action strategy and set of tactics has very serious implications. In choosing a social action approach that emphasizes conflict, organizers construct a "we/they" contest and often adopt more coercive means to influence a situational enemy, the adversarial target. Members of the group challenging the "status quo" are coached to disregard the target's humanity and thus not to feel obliged to treat the adversarial target with respect or courtesy. As the orchestrated conflict unfolds, escalation and the use of more radical tactics demonize and dehumanize the adversary, which further alienates members of the broader community who do not understand the basis for the challenging groups' "righteous anger" (Gamson, 1995). By emphasizing intractable differences and adopting an attitude of superiority over the adversary, the conflict model reinforces boundaries within a community. Rather than building the community's total capacity, the social action/conflict approach stiffens barriers and fragments the community further. Community-wide collaborations and understanding between segments of the community are even less likely. Not only do short-term successes fail to build empowered communities cumulatively, but also future community building efforts are less likely to succeed. Reconciliation between challengers of the status quo and beneficiaries of the status quo becomes less likely. In the short run, the challengers may achieve a victory on an issue, but by crystallizing factions within the community and demonizing the target, direct action impairs the development of community-wide collaboration and understanding.

The dilemma of the self-help, locality development or community transformation modality pivots on the fragile horizontal ties of a locality as a bounded community. When at-risk, low resource communities build relationships to harness their assets to promote locally owned and governed projects, they build horizontal ties. Eventually, many communities try to access resources outside their local community to sustain collaborative projects resulting from collaborations and partnerships. The vertical ties may weaken horizontal ties and co-opt the original development goals. Disempowerment, not empowerment, is the outcome.

The previous frameworks for changing, developing and transforming communities have several lacunae. As Christenson recognizes, the overriding weakness is the absence of a theoretical base with corresponding empirical evidence to guide the contingent use of the frameworks. If practitioners of community practice are to mix and blend the strategies of community change and empowerment, then they will need to choose intelligently among alternative strategies and tactics based on the local context and the nature of the challenge a community faces.

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A second lacuna in the frameworks of Rothman and Christenson stems from the nature of the literature they review to abstract and summarize the status of community practice. Although both refer to Alinsky, the founder of community organizing and direct action, neither cite Myles Horton's work at the Highlander Folk School, the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement (Morris, 1984), Paulo Freire's work with peasant associations and Catholic activists in Brazil, or Gandhi's campaign for India's independence from colonial imperialism. Yet, these legends contributed to the most important forms of community change of the 20th century. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King both participated as residents at Horton's Highlander Folk School, a model for adult education, before they emerged as leaders in the Civil Rights Movement (Glen, 1988; Horton, 1990). Inspired by Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1968), Freire devoted himself to the relief of oppression in Latin America (2000 [ 1970]). In addition, of course, many serious students of community change, development, and transformation know Mahatma Gandhi's strategy to transform India from an exploited and colonized state to an independent nation. However, these frameworks do not incorporate explicitly Gandhi's strategic use of satyagraha, passive resistance, and ahimsa, non-injury to other living beings (Gamson, 1995). These giants of self-help and community transformation developed their approaches to community empowerment from the grassroots after first focusing on the power of the "haves" and the powerlessness of the "have-nots."

These frameworks do not explicitly deal with power, and that is a third lacuna. Only Hanna and Robinson (1994) build their framework on dimensions of power (Lukes, 1978). If a community has experienced oppression, then the transformative approach is the only choice. Oppression results when households and individuals are dominated along four dimensions of community: (1) relationships of intimacy, friendship, and subjective fulfillment; (2) the economic self-provisioning transactions of households and individuals; (3) the political institutions of the public realm; and (4) the cultural patterns of a shared heritage within a local political, economic, and social context. Although they develop and illustrate the implications of these four dimensions as "functional communities" for the contingent choice of strategies by examining liberation theology and the emancipation of Latinos in the United States, Hanna and Robinson, however, do not analyze power and oppression thoroughly. They do not connect further the variations of community context and emergent issues with their descriptions of theory, concepts, and skills of traditional, direct action, and transformative practices to change communities.

THE CARDINAL PRINCIPLES OF WHOLE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Fifteen years ago, after intense observation of the many bottom-up community organizations in urban and in rural areas of North America, Kretzmann and McKnight realized that residents made communities better by taking matters

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into their own hands. Residents used their own talents and gifts and worked together to accomplish their chosen objectives with patience and a commitment to learn from their efforts. This inside focus, rather than an outside focus, depended upon the power of the people of a neighborhood. True, grassroots groups may adopt some of the tactics Alinsky advised: they may even seek the counsel or expertise of an outsider, but residents sat in the driver's seat.

Since the early 1990s, McKnight and Kretzmann of the ABCD Institute at Northwestern University and their colleagues have worked with diverse people, organizations, and communities in North America and throughout the world. The challenge of building vital communities based on their "assets" from the inside out has engaged health care providers, business leaders, philanthropists, police and criminal justice leaders, youth development workers, educators, human service providers, religious groups, leaders in the disabilities field, government officials, and international development groups.

Within neighborhoods and communities, the ABCD Institute continues to work with and learn from people who develop residents' talents and gifts, build relationships for mutual gain, develop the local economy, convene representative groups for community visioning and leverage outside resources. Recently, at a gathering of the ABCD Institute's Neighborhood Circle,5 McKnight (2001) reflected on four lessons that constitute the cardinal principles of whole community organizing for the 21st century:

"First, a powerful, empowered community can address issues on the outside and the inside of the neighborhood or the community. Second, we must concern ourselves with the whole person, not just one issue that angers people we meet while door knocking. Third, a strong community is a community where everyone gives to the effort. If just a part of the community, say a handful of designated 'leaders' gets involved, the whole community does not prosper. In our communities and neighborhoods we should look at everyone and say, 'we need you.' Fourth, before reaching out to resources from external sources, a locally led community or neighborhood group needs to develop a coherent organization with the capacity to collaborate with external sources.

"Whole Community Organizing for the 21st century requires the cooperation and collaboration of everyone; it demands peoples' heroism, their courage, and their love. It means that everyone in the neighborhood or community contributes their talents and gifts for themselves and for everyone else. We want to create a situation where everyone belongs and everyone gives their gifts."

As community groups mobilize community assets, especially the talents and gifts of residents, and build their community from the inside out, practitioners and residents should not waver from the necessary process

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principles of whole community organizing. These practice principles are more than guidelines abstracted from taxonomies of assumptions, goals, roles, and skills packaged as frameworks for community practice. Adherence to these principles yields instrumental results: they work and the practitioner does not need to weigh the goodness of fit between on-the-ground circumstances and the particular mode of intervention suggested by a framework or a set of case studies. Whole community organizing requires practitioners to "walk the talk" and in so doing, community practice surmounts the dilemmas and contradictions of earlier intervention frameworks.

First, whole community organizing resolves the dilemmas and contradictions of previous frameworks by specifying that in community change everyone should be included, not just the local leaders or the elites who normally "take charge" and initiate planning efforts to develop the community or the economy. Everyone has a stake in the community. The voices, gifts, and talents of everyone are indispensable. Any effort from the "top" to plan or develop a shared vision has to include the marginalized. Otherwise, lingering resentments and distrust of the elites' motives continue, and the marginalized do not participate or contribute their energies to solve the problems in the community.

Second, by addressing the "whole" community, including people of different class, race, ethnicity, religion, "ablement," and age, the "self-interest" on which direct organizers focus as they stir up anger and righteous indignation, may expand to take in the other, i.e., those whom the organizers objectify as the "target." Empathy, a precursor to caring and compassion, may develop when relationships between those on the margin and allies are formed. People may begin to realize that they share a mutual fate and, with facilitation, old cleavages and violations of trust can be repaired. With everyone respecting the other and the other's talents and gifts, persons who were previously adversaries may become fellow travelers searching for a remedy to which everyone has contributed and with which most people identify. This respect explains why the values of non-injury and passive resistance towards one's oppressors, ahimsa, and satyagraha, successfully overthrew British rule in India. Gandhi may have tapped into people's anger, but it was generally redirected at the situation that also oppresses the oppressor. Challengers to the colonizer demonstrated "an active commitment to and respect for the opponent's humanity" (Gamson, 1995, p. 14). When groups who challenge the ruling class or group demonize the target by not considering the colonizer as human, they burn the bridges they may need when issues arise in the future. Satyagraha and ahimsa are foundations for a wide-ranging approach that includes all participants in a search for a just solution. All share responsibility for a common future.

Third, when various segments of the community form new relationships to overcome old hurts and slights and old disagreements, a community builds ties that are more horizontal and open more networks that may lead to securing access to resources outside of the locality. The concern that vertical ties may

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lead to the disintegration of horizontal ties recedes when well-connected community groups work together across lines and cleavages to seek resources on the community's terms. The horizontal relationships drive the vertical ties and thwart co-optation by those with external resources.

In addition to the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, many case studies support the argument for whole community organizing (Moore & Puntenney, 1999; Snow, 2001a, 2001b). To fill in the most significant lacuna of previous frameworks, we need to articulate the theoretical basis and provide convincing empirical evidence support for whole community organizing.

THEORETICAL SUPPORT FOR WHOLE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Whole community organizing is supported both by advances in the theory of community and in the theoretical base for building social relationships to overcome barriers between people within and outside of a community, consistent with the dimensions of power. More than ever before, decision-makers at the regional, state, or national level determine policies that affect local communities (Bridger & Luloff, 1999). The global economy has attenuated the community as a social system within a particular boundary. This attenuation has led to scholars' increasing treatment of community as a field of interaction. In his most recent work, Wilkinson (1991) joins the work of George Herbert Mead (1934) and Ferdinand Toennies (1957 [1887]) to underscore the importance of social interaction for the development of mutually shared meaning that characterizes the elemental bond between the self and the other. For Wilkinson (1991), community resides in the process of social interactions within a local community, "even though the community is no longer self-contained, clearly bounded, or members of the community participate in extra-local structures."

In community fields, actors, as well as informal and formal associations, direct their activities towards certain interests that cut across the specific groups and special interests that form along the lines and barriers of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. According to Wilkinson, a "social field" develops as actors and associations share specific interests and direct their activities toward a particular institution or policy domain within a locality defined by a divisive, narrower set of interactions.6 However, a community field integrates the less inclusive social field of a locality "into a generalized whole (emphasis added)."

Community fields develop, says Wilkinson (1991), where people live together and interact on matters concerning the common interest in the locality. Thus, residents share an elemental bond of community, Gemeinschaft, which stems from the common use of an area leading to episodes, events, and processes called community actions.7

"In the general sense, Gemeinschaft, arises because people engage naturally in social interactions, and social interaction demands and

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assures that they form a commonality as they share meanings through symbolic communication" (Wilkinson, 1991, pp. 38-39).

Bridger and Luloff (1999) state, "The community field brings into focus common interests in local aspects of local life...as the linkages that comprise the community field proliferate, they lead to a more inclusive decision-making process." If practitioners and residents open lines of communication between special interest groups to intentionally transcend differences that divide people in a locality, they foster collaboration that will sustain community development and change. This theoretical treatment of the whole community as an interactional community field that surmounts the barriers between people of different class, race, ethnicity, and gender, and their special interests, corresponds to the inclusive participation of everyone in McKnight's whole community approach to community practice. To use this approach, however, requires that people build relationships with others with whom they may never have seen "eye to eye," people whom they have distrusted and, perhaps, even feared.

Treating the community as an interactional field is the first advance in theory that supports whole community organizing. The second theoretical advance is the increasing focus on building more authentic reciprocating social relationships across barriers, the fault line of "identity politics." Previous approaches to community change and empowerment have assumed that solidarity groups that challenge the status quo or groups that control resources and institutions were relatively homogenous. Whole community organizing, however, dictates that people who differ must learn to form respectful relationships premised on the reciprocal recognition of the other's talents and gifts. In the global era, people will need to transcend differences, unite around a common shared vision of the future, and act locally. Stratified communities that do not break down social barriers are less likely to sustain successful collective action for the whole community. In whole community organizing, the focus on relationships, reciprocal gifts and talents, and inclusive self-interest, contradicts the monolithic perception of the powerful.

The 20lh century taxonomies of interventions to change communities, and the insightful studies of the dimensions of power (Gaventa, 1980) and of the "haves" and "have-nots" (Duncan, 1999), lead to despair because those works always seem to point towards oppositional strategies to fight the reproduction of social inequality. For the future, communities will need to cooperate and collaborate to break down social barriers. As Wilkinson (1991), Luloff and Swanson (1995), Bridger and Luloff (1999), and Swanson (2001) all suggest, to organize social interactions of the community field, people will have to form relationships that bridge historical barriers between groups of the community if they are to take collective action on behalf of the whole community. The dominant racial or classist groups weaken the solidarity of subordinate groups that oppose them and perpetuate poverty with four generic, face-to-face processes: othering, subordinate adaptation, boundary maintenance, and emotional management

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(Schwalbe et al., 2001). The initial dynamic of othering shapes the nature of interactions and the subsequent relationships among individuals and groups.8

Othering refers to the process whereby a dominant group defines into existence an alleged "inferior" group, inventing categories and ideas about what characterizes people who belong to the inferior group. Over time, the dominant group assumes a collective identity congruent in a particular way. One subtype is oppressive othering that asserts that differences are "deficits," and ideologies emerge to support the deficits of others, i.e., racism and classism. Another is defensive othering among subordinates. Members of the subordinate group may seek membership in the dominant group or they may try to avoid the stigma attached to membership in the alleged "inferior" group. The marginal person acknowledges the "legitimacy of the devalued identity," but rejects his or her membership in the devalued category in this adaptive process.

Othering is part of an emerging theory on the relational nature of social inequality (see, for example, Schwalbe, 2000; Tilly, 2000) and deserves attention from scholars and practitioners of community development. By attending to othering, then we may devise civic practices that contradict othering, generate authentic relationships, and build community-wide awareness and a shared understanding of a common future (Raymond, 2002). In Schwalbe's view, the generation of inequality is caused by exploitation, which in turn depends on othering—that labeling of a to-be-exploited group as somehow different and inferior to the manipulative group of exploiters. Whole community organizing necessitates that people form relationships across lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender, for example, to address a threat to their present or future quality of life. In building authentic relationships that respect differences and honor the wide-ranging gifts and talents each person can contribute to shaping a shared community in the future, whole community organizing parallels the "authentic praxis" of Paulo Freire (2000 [1970]). Those who previously practiced othering within a structure of domination and privilege ideally may become allies in solidarity with the othered. After reflecting upon their relationships and their lack of "community," those who othered/oppressed other groups may confront the reality of the present and the options of the future with those they othered/oppressed, and collectively, all groups may commit to new processes that liberate everyone.

These critical theoretical developments in the scholarship on inequality affirm Freire's principles in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Allies in solidarity with the oppressed do not form relationships with those who demonize them as the other. Neo-Alinsky organizers rely on othering when they dehumanize the adversary, stir up anger and resentment during door knocking and in one-on-ones conversations when they try to recruit residents to the cause. In contrast, the whole community organizer behaves respectfully and attempts to reframe the other not as an adversary but as someone with whom to work in building an alternative future. In words that resonate with Freire's authentic praxis and McKnight's whole community organizing, Harvey Jackins, a mid-20th century

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Aigner, Raymond and Smidt 9 7

labor organizer from the Northwest, realized the importance of transformed relationships for programs of liberation.

"People can only be effectively organized to participate in liberation on an individual basis. Calling mass meetings, distributing leaflets, and other 'mass' activities are an almost complete waste of time unless they are peripheral to a systematic making of individual friends, who will consider a liberation program if you offer it because they trust you.. .We can learn to love and trust each other, but we must begin with an attitude of respect, of complete respect for every human being in the world. The love and trust can come later.. .The only relationships strong enough to carry us through the strains of wide world changing are close personal friendships; if you're not too embarrassed, call it love. You have to love each other (Jackins, 1989, pp. 29-30)."

Community change theorists of inequality, power, and empowerment strategies lend their support to whole community organizing. Even academicians dedicated to development give voice to their affective views of community, relationships, and ways to prepare for the future. In the twilight of his career, Wilkinson (1991) advocated joining the ideas of community building and social relationships to the community field, resulting in collective actions and communion:

"Consciousness of community and joyful response to the relationships that are realized...contribute to social well-being by encouraging equity, openness, tolerance, and collective action. Communion in the true sense represents an opening of consciousness and of the emotional life of a people to the relationships that already exist among them. With communion, self arises and common shared purpose becomes a factor in subsequent social interaction (Wilkinson, 1991, pp. 74-75)."

These compelling perspectives form a theoretical foundation for the whole community approach to community change and empowerment within the context of globalization. In the past, the unsystematic accumulation of case studies formed the evidentiary base for intervention frameworks and adaptations by practitioners of community change strategies. For whole community organizing, however, both case studies and variable-based analysis of larger samples of communities lend empirical support for the theoretical perspectives on community as an interactional field and on strong and effective resident-led, community-based strategies to empower communities.

EMPIRICAL SUPPORT FOR WHOLE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

The literature on community development and practice includes case studies that invoke the importance of the community field. Various case studies

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illustrate the need, for example, to join people of color to pursue superordinate goals (Berryhill & Linney, 2000), to bridge networks of community members participating to develop their communities and their economies (Murray & Greer, 1997: Gruidl & Stephens, 2000), and to link communities that foster collaboration between community groups to address family violence (Borden, 1999). Others empirically support community development strategies that are not the usual top-down strategies. Rupasingha et al. (1999), and Flora et al. (1997), report the success of the self-organized approach to community and economic development. Apart from the evidence for concepts that are parallel to community field, there are recent findings that pertain directly to the community field, to the efficacy of resident participation and governance for "powerful, empowered communities" and, therefore, for sustainable community development.

Sharp (2001) investigates the concept of the community field and analyzes the power networks between organizations and data from key informants in three US communities in different states, showing that successful collective action on behalf of the broader community depends on the level of social infrastructure. Sharp concludes that community fields with the capacity to take action on behalf of the wider community satisfy six criteria:

1) a diverse and inclusive community organization or coalition, which generates community wide awareness and facilitates the flow of information and resources;

2) generalized leaders who seek to build bridges between diverse social fields;

3) capacity for leadership development; 4) organizations or institutions with resources available for

community development; 5) multi-interest planning processes; and 6) proactive action organized in response to collectively

recognized community needs. Congruent with the Sharp's criteria, we offer additional evidence that confirms the efficacy of locality-based development.

Recent empirical investigation into the sustainable community and economic development in persistently poor, rural communities provides evidence of the impact of inclusive approaches to citizen engagement, participation, and governance in alignment with whole community organizing. Since 1995, the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development (www.ncrcrd.iastate.edu) has tracked the progress of the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community Initiative (EZ/ECI) in 33 persistently poor rural communities.9 Rural areas had to use census tracts just like the urban empowerment zones or enterprise communities. The organizational and institutional entities and residents who assembled to form the mandated community-based partnerships represented the potential of a community field dedicated to the community wide objective of

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reducing persistent poverty within ten years. Each of the 33 selected sites received a line of credit from the Social Security Block Grant: 30 enterprise communities received $2.9 million and 3 empowerment zones received $40 million.

During the six-month planning phase, communities that first used personal relationships and face-to-face communication channels—and then organized participants into subgroups based on shared interests—were much more likely to adopt governance structures on which residents, not elected officials or selected, handpicked representatives, were the majority (Aigner et al., 1999). We classified 11 sites that chose to put residents in charge, as examples of the "empowerment paradigm." The other 22 sites chose to comprise their boards in the usual fashion, i.e., with elected officials or hand-selected representatives of organizations and institutions, some of whom were not even residing in the boundaries of the census tracts. The 22 sites doing "business as usual" represent the "old paradigm."

Once governance boards implemented their projects to increase the capacity of the governance structure and the community-based partnerships, to raise financial capital, to construct necessary infrastructure, to improve health and human services, including education, and to protect natural resources, the positive effects of the empowerment paradigm emerged. Congruent with McKnight's fourth lesson in whole community organizing, governance boards that chose strategies matching the empowerment paradigm leveraged significantly more resources from a broader variety of sources compared to boards that chose the old paradigm (Aigner, Flora, & Hernandez, 2001). Furthermore, when we examined the projects designed to build "community capacity," we found that the 11 resident-led, resident-governed sites were consistent with McKnight's lessons of whole community organizing and the empowerment paradigm, which accounted for 58.33 percent of all community capacity building projects for the 33 sites (Aigner et al., 2001).'° We also discovered that EZ/ECI governing boards dominated by elected residents, i.e., the boards we predict will lead to more sustainable development, significantly and strongly supported projects that increased the community's capacity for self-organized community and economic development projects. Moreover, participant-dominated governing boards have developed more partnerships with funding sources to support these community capacity-enhancing projects (Aigner etal., 2001).

The second empirical example comes from the nonprofit organization, Beyond Welfare, (www.beyondwelfare.org), a member of the ABCD Neighborhood Circle, which provides the initial data on the intentional formation of authentic, reciprocating, mutual relationships that promote transformational community building of whole community organizing. Beyond Welfare is a four-year-old project governed by an elected board of directors comprised primarily of low-income residents. Beyond Welfare has articulated its shared values that support a common vision of a community:

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http://www.beyondwelfare.org


• each person has an inherent intelligence with which to mobilize his or her talents and gifts and face any challenge;

• each person's well-being is deeply connected to the well-being of all and caring relationships are critical to each one's well being;

• each personal relationship is based on deep, reciprocal sharing and nonjudgmental respect for the inherent dignity and worth of others; and

• everyone has the resources to realize his or her sense of purpose, to fulfill his or her relationships, and to contribute to the common good.

Based on these values, Beyond Welfare's mission is to "end poverty" in Story County, Iowa, by 2020. To accomplish the goal, Beyond Welfare is building relationships, i.e., horizontal ties, across divisions of class, ethnicity, and race, which exist between marginalized groups with insufficient income and groups with sufficient income to achieve their purposes in life. In the short run, Beyond Welfare invites community residents from the faith community, civic clubs, and personal networks of other allies to form "partner" relationships with participants who seek self-sufficiency. Thus, Beyond Welfare facilitates the building of relationships to end social isolation and help families break away from poverty.

Beyond Welfare orients and selects potential partners using a tool called "listening pairs," in which prospective partners model and practice reciprocity through attentive listening, as each person in the pair takes a turn and speaks to a topic or question while the other person listens without interruption or judgment (Aigner et al., 2002). In listening pairs, potential partners, who have already expressed interest in Beyond Welfare's values and missions, practice by addressing the following questions:

• When you were vulnerable, when you were struggling in your life, how did you handle it? Who was helpful? What qualities did they show?

• When you were growing up, what did you learn from family and friends about class and race or ethnic background?

• What would a poor person say or do that fits the stereotype(s) you learned?

• What triggers your attitudes about poverty, i.e., your vulnerability as a family partner?

• How will you use Beyond Welfare to work through your feelings and attitudes?

After each listening pair, everyone participates in a facilitated, large group discussion that builds solidarity and relationships as people share their story as others listen. Partners are matched with participants based on shared

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gifts, talents, and other interests. The participant and the partner each learn from the other as they plan strategies for networking to locate resources and meet the challenges of self-provisioning and obtaining affordable housing. Every week allies and partners join participants and their families for a community dinner, followed by study-circle sessions on advocacy and strategies that support goal achievement and maintain effective, caring relationships. Beyond Welfare works with participants to organize customized networks for reaching meaningful personal goals. Over time, Beyond Welfare plans to mobilize a constituency of participants, allies, and partners who understand systemic poverty and who have learned to care for each other and advocate for affordable housing and livable wages at the local and state level.

The evaluation of the outcome of participants who have left welfare and participants who have remained on welfare indicates a total return on investment of 622 percent. That is, the sum of increases in income from work and the decreased use of food stamps and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) is 6.2 times larger than the budget for the same twelve months. The 52 percent who sustain their progress towards sufficient "money, meaning and effective relationships" differ from those who still receive welfare only with respect to number of Beyond Welfare's relationship features they use to achieve self-sufficiency. Previous years on welfare, work history, level of education, age at first birth, number of children under five, or a history of substance abuse did not account for a person's ability to move beyond Welfare towards independence. Merging with other participants, partners, and allies— using spin-offs that attempt to replicate Beyond Welfare's community-building strategies across the state— Beyond Welfare has formed a coalition that blocked cuts in Iowa's childcare budget in the FY 2003 legislative session. However well-documented, one illustrative case of intentionally facilitated transformative relationships and the construction of a community field to achieve community change and empowerment is just a beginning.

Progressive scholars and practitioners of community change and empowerment must connect assessments of the networks of power structures to the organized emergence of community fields to strategies that foster authentic, reciprocating respectful social relationships, i.e., horizontal ties, across historical chasms of racial, class based differences, distrust, and narrow exclusive interests. When scholars and practitioners collectively mobilize community assets and build community from the inside out, in accord with the cardinal principles of whole community organizing, then we will contribute to the efficacy of community change and empowerment practices.

CONCLUSION Within the historical and spatial context of economic trends, face-to-

face social interactions and social relationships have constituted the core elements of community. The current global era presents new challenges to the

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practice of community change that leads to empowerment. Present-day communities are less constrained by physical boundaries that delimit membership and a shared place. The contemporary context challenges people who share both a locality and a future to develop a community wide awareness that cuts across cleavages of race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ablement, and age to take collective action that sustains the development of the community, not just one sector or one privileged form of industry.

The obsolete frameworks of community intervention strategies and tactics have not bridged across divisions within communities, and they offer little to communities that need to build solidarity to act locally in a global era. The half-formed assumptions and theories, as well as the matching roles and skills of past approaches to community development, change, and empowerment, are fraught with dilemmas and contradictions that reinforce existing differences and reproduce social inequality.

However, scholars and researchers of community theory and practice have articulated the concept of the community field to emphasize social interactions that include the whole community and its authentic social relationships that often act in repairing prior hurts and resentments and supplant despair with hope. John McKnight has synthesized the lessons and principles of asset-based community development, gleaned from field observations over the last decade, an approach he calls whole community organizing. Practices of asset-based community development in accord with the cardinal principles of whole community organizing seem to work. Theoretical arguments and empirical findings support the ongoing elaboration and refinement of the whole community organizing approach to community change and empowerment. Scholars, researchers, and practitioners of community change and empowerment are well-positioned to attempt collaboratively to complete the visions and missions of 20th century legends like Saul Alinsky, Mohandas Gandhi, Paolo Freire, and Myles Horton.

NOTES 1. Rothman (1995) identifies twelve attributes of each modality: goal categories,

assumptions of community structure and problem conditions, basic change strategy, characteristic tactics and techniques, practitioner roles, medium of change, orientation toward power structure, boundary of the beneficiary, assumptions of the interests of community subparts, conception of the beneficiary, role of the beneficiary, and use of empowerment.

2. Christenson (1989) compares the three themes on five categories: roles of the change agent, task or process orientation, typical clientele, speed of change, and sustainability of change.

3. Hanna and Robinson (1994) elaborate their three primary strategies into comparison matrices on (a) theory, i.e., "why you do what you do"; (b) concepts, i.e., "what do you do?" and (c) skills, i.e., "how you do it."

4. Blakely (1989) draws on Summers (1986) to elaborate upon the emergence of neoclassical economic theory as a basis for development theory that features development in the community rather than development of the community as a locality or a social system.

5. The ABCD Neighborhood Circle consists of 8 citizen-led and governed community

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organizations in city neighborhoods, suburbs and rural towns of North America that collaborate with the ABCD Institute to share "best practices" and to identify and sharpen strategies for applying the basic ABCD principles for empowerment and community transformation. Beyond Welfare of Ames, Iowa is a member of the Neighborhood Circle.

6. Kaufman (1959) first introduced the concept of interactional field. Wilkinson (1991) has extended and refined the concept to include a "community field." A number of research scholars have elaborated the interactional perspective on the social and community fields of a locality. We have mentioned several of the more useful examples that comprise this body of work for the practice of community development and transformation (Bridger and Luloff, 1999; Luloff and Swanson, 1995; Sharp, 2001; Swanson, 2000).

7. Wilkinson's use of Gemeinschaft is more a nuanced interpretation than a literal adoption of Toennies' elemental bond that is rooted in a shared soil, and devotion to family and kin.

8. Once the members of the dominant group place others into the "inferior" group, a second generic process takes off, called subordinate adaptation. Schwalbe and his colleagues (2001) rely on qualitative studies of "oppressive situations" to illustrate the adaptive strategies people use to deal with inequality and their subordinate status: "trading power for patronage and autonomy," "forming alternative subcultures," and acquiescence ("hustling or dropping out"). The dominant group triggers a third process, boundary maintenance, by erecting and maintaining symbolic, interactional, and spatial barriers "to protect their material and cultural capital," in order to preserve their dominance. Adaptive strategies include the following sub-processes: (1) transmitting cultural capital; (2) controlling network access; and (3) the use or threat of violence. To sustain a system of inequality, Schwalbe et al. say a fourth generic process, emotional management, develops. In face-to-face encounters between the dominant and the subordinate, people regulate their emotions with three sub-processes to manage emotions: (1) regulating discourse; (2) conditioning emotional subjectivity; and (3) scripting mass events.

9. Empowerment zones and enterprise communities are different from the state-designated enterprise zones that started in the 1980s or the international free-trade zones that also formed in the 1980s. The latter two efforts concentrate on economic gain as an end it itself. The Clinton-Gore EZ/EC Initiative adds "empowerment" to zone and "community" to enterprise, thereby refocusing efforts from the goal of economic development alone to one aimed at improving locally-oriented action by local people for their locality.

10. Projects to develop community capacity usually focus on the organizational development of the governing boards and voluntary associations involved as partners in the activity: conflict management, consensus decision-making, project management, working with volunteers, holding meetings, and accountability to census tract residents.

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“whole community organizing” for the 21 st century

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