ADDRESSING CONCEPTUAL AND IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES

The significant limitations in how many

community-based change strategies are framed presents an important challenge for the philanthropic community, which as the principal advocate for the approach bears responsibility for attracting broader interest to it. Some of the limitations are conceptual and can be addressed through a disciplined, evidence-based review of the premises and change theories as- sociated with the strategic initiatives that shaped the field. Other limitations have more to do with the capacity avail- able on the ground to implement chosen strategies and the institutional roles that funders and their implementation part- ners play to advance particular initiatives.

Critics of comprehensive place-based change have long pointed to these limita- tions as significant flaws in the approach. For those who have criticized this type of investment from the start, the mixed re- sults of numerous initiatives offer proof of the limited potential for place-based com- munity initiatives to address, on a large scale, the issues of poverty and disinvest- ment that plague lower-income popula- tions. For the field to move forward and build on the positive work documented here, more must be done to refine con- ceptual underpinnings and firm up the principles behind implementation. This conceptual cleanup is an integral part of the work needed to frame a new develop- mental phase.

There are at least four challenges to moving beyond the pattern of individual- ized initiatives and toward a more coher- ent field-wide strategy for broadening the impact of place-based community change.

Rethinking the notion of “community” as a bounded target population for the pur- poses of measuring the impacts of a com- prehensive community change strategy. The theories and logic models that have guided numerous community-based initia- tives have overlooked the degree of com- plexity and openness that exists in com- munities. The prevailing idea has been that the communities selected as focal points for a comprehensive strategy are isolated enough from their surrounding environ- ments that their resident populations can serve as appropriate units of analysis for measuring impacts. We know, however, that communities are highly complex and open systems characterized by enormous mobility of residents; continual shifts in the influence of internal actors on the com- munity and one another; very significant external political, economic, and market influences on conditions within the com- munity; dynamic interplays of ethnic and cultural factors within diverse subcommu- nities that live in relatively small geograph- ic areas; and so on.

For the field to advance, more realistic frameworks are needed to describe work in communities and to capture the posi- tive results. There has been a tendency to frame ambitious change initiatives using an overly prescriptive, outcome-based funding approach. Too many change ef- forts have been “sold” based on a well- articulated but utterly unrealistic set of results that bear no possible relationship to the actual program interventions made or the scale of resources invested.

This kind of wrong thinking does little to advance the credibility of the work and can lead program designers and evalua- tors to overlook the more subtle but im- portant impacts that community-based in- terventions can have on intracommunity

relationships and social capital, new and enduring institutional partnerships and program collaborations, service quality improvements, and even broader politi- cal and economic realignments that yield benefits long after the formal initiative has ended. Community stakeholders and practitioners on the ground often see these benefits, but they are easily over- looked in how place-based work is docu- mented and assessed.

Rethinking the scope and time frame of philanthropic investments in community capacity and change. Critics of compre- hensive change initiatives often point to unrealistic assumptions about the strate- gies and the scale and duration of invest- ments needed to make a difference. Typi- cally, such strategies involve multiyear work plans that progress from engaging residents and other community stake- holders to formulating community-based plans, building organizational capacity and relationships, attracting additional investors and resources, and implement- ing programs aimed at improving quality of life and/or outcomes for individuals in- volved in the change process.

A crippling drawback of such logic frameworks is their assumption that work can proceed linearly and, worse, that all stages of the process can be accom- plished within a typical two-phase funding cycle of five to six years. The notion that communities that have experienced two or more generations of disinvestment and decline can be stabilized and improved in such a short time, using modest levels of resources, is simply naïve. Moreover, the tendency to conceive of complex change processes as relatively temporary inter- ventions involving modest levels of in- vestment designed to yield well-specified,

near-term outcomes weakens the credibil- ity of the approach and undercuts support for this work over the long term.

Looking ahead, the process of com- munity engagement and change needs to be framed as an investment whose results are measured over decades—similar to the long-term democratic institution building strategies found in international develop- ment. The work of foundations also must shift from well-bounded interventions to partnership building strategies aimed at establishing platforms of financial and technical support that are anchored with- in a community and built to last. Such a strategy would compel funders to think beyond the grant resources at their own disposal and encourage them to draw on a broader repertoire of resources, includ- ing convening authority, political clout, persuasion, and policy advocacy.

Framing the issue of “scalability” in a way that helps funders to transition from individual initiatives to broader, system building work. The field needs to become more explicit about what it takes to move from a network of relatively isolated, time-limited experiments to a broader- based strategy with potential to achieve greater scale and impact. Most place- based change strategies largely ignored this fundamental scalability problem, but we will make little progress in the future unless we bring this problem into bet- ter focus. And because the philanthropic sector created this area of work, the bur- den falls squarely on philanthropy to incorporate lessons learned about what happens when funder-sponsored initia- tives wind down.

For example: What is the value of a multiyear philanthropic investment in a target community without a strategy for

sustaining and growing the work after the funding spree is over? What are realistic expectations for how significant invest- ments in plans, programs, capacity, and relationships are sustained and deployed to carry the change work forward? What obligations do funders have to establish (and perhaps fund) the broader-based investment partnerships needed to ag- gregate public and private dollars to cre- ate sustainable streams of investment in places where a change process has been launched?

The burden on the philanthropic sec- tor increases to the degree that the foun- dation investments made over the past two decades have now begun to influ- ence emerging public-sector responses, both locally and now at the federal lev- el. For the future viability of this work, funders need to be more explicit about their assumptions for where investments will lead—and perhaps more accountable for using their dollars and other types of influence to ensure the sustainability of this approach.

Broadening the range of options that funders consider for investing in the field.

Mainstream funding for comprehensive community change still centers on tradi- tional grant-making. To be sure, we now have numerous examples of individual funders choosing to supplement grant strategies with other activities intended to stimulate complementary community investments. Typically, these include act- ing as brokers and connectors to public and private actors who can expand the flow of resources and investments into a target community, or serving as policy advocates and champions for place-based investment. However, most of the think- ing about how to advance this work is

still relatively narrow and constrained. A strategy for growing the field must ex- pand the ways in which the philanthropic sector uses resources and influence to broaden the scope of current efforts and help the field acquire greater relevance and impact.

In fact, as this review of community change efforts shows, several high-pro- file innovations (e.g., Annie E. Casey’s work in East Baltimore and the Jacobs Family Foundation’s work in San Diego) have exposed the potential for much broader investment approaches. Cur- rently, these are interesting exceptions rather than accepted tools for achieving impact and attracting a sustainable flow of resources. Thinking more broadly still, there are other ways that members of the philanthropic community who are com- mitted to place-base community change could harness their collective might to advance a field building agenda. Options include strategies for information sharing and peer learning, funding for a network of intermediaries and support organiza- tions focused on growing the field, more financial incentives and inducements for local and regional foundations to consid- er long-term investments in community change, and more focused policy advo- cacy on behalf of supportive legislation and permanent funding streams. The options are many, but the likelihood of their coming into being is small, absent a more coherent, broadly supported agen- da for scaling up the work.

Comprehensive community change is an

approach with far more potential than has yet been realized. We are now at an important juncture in the field’s develop- ment. The challenge is to move this ap- proach to a more central position in the

arsenal of approaches to poverty allevia- tion and community revitalization. This challenge calls for a more purposeful, field-wide agenda to guide a new phase of philanthropic investments that are explic- itly focused on scaling up the work. Meet- ing this challenge will require disciplined thinking, increased investment, and bold leadership. With those ingredients, this field has a good chance of increasing its relevance and impact.e

Response Essay

By Mark L. Joseph Case Western Reserve University

Cleveland Don’t do initiatives. Tucked away, almost

innocuously, deep within this volume’s ex- cellent overview of the community change field, is this provocative statement: “One implication is that foundations should re- think the assumptions underlying a deci- sion to structure place-based change work in the form of an ‘initiative.’”

Has the time truly come to boldly move beyond the initiative as the accept- ed model through which to generate com- prehensive community change? I believe the answer is yes, and I believe that this conclusion reached by the Aspen Round- table team deserves serious reflection, debate, and action by those who will craft the next generation of community change work. If we believe that comprehensive community change is required to dramati- cally alter social conditions, but we realize that initiatives are a fundamentally flawed and limited mechanism to achieve it, how do we, as a field, move ahead? The great news is that the alternative is already emerging under our very noses, and in

one case (Dudley Street), it was ironically there from the very beginning.

After almost two decades of working with dozens of community change initia- tives, I had grown overly comfortable with the practical approach of using an “initia- tive”—despite its flaws—as the obvious and rational way to implement a complex, multifaceted concept such as comprehen- sive community change. It was a help- ful wake-up call a few years ago when I launched into a lecture on CCIs at my uni- versity and was ready to dive deep into their characteristics, accomplishments, and challenges when a student stopped me to ask a basic question I had over- looked: “What’s an initiative?”

Over the years, as I have taken more time at the start of lectures on CCIs to describe the benefits and peculiarities of initiatives as a general model for sup- porting local action, students have raised concerns about why this approach makes sense. Single sponsor? Externally gener- ated guiding ideas and principles? Time limited? And this is meant to generate sustainable community change?

The authors of this volume reach the same conclusion:

The fact that they are foundation sponsored, time limited, externally catalyzed, and require new imple- mentation processes or structures in the context of ongoing neighborhood programs has worked against them. The premise that an initiative-driven infusion of a predetermined amount of foundation’s funds—no matter how flexible or how comparatively large and long-term by foundation standards—can significantly change the overall trajectory of a disinvested community over a relatively short

period of time can no longer be sup- ported. This argues against relying on stand-alone, comprehensive, com- munity change initiatives.

It is definitely time to confront this ques-

tion, especially as the federal govern- ment and prospective applicants around the country gear up for the launch of two new, major community change initia- tives, Choice Neighborhoods and Prom- ise Neighborhoods. The failed promise of Empowerment Zones is a not-so-distant memory. Too many major initiatives have come and gone with too little sustained benefit to show for all the time, energy, and financial investment. Too little has been made of initiatives that ended qui- etly after falling obviously short of their aspirations, too much has been made of program-level outputs, and there has been too much allowance for the intan- gible, unmeasured benefits that we are convinced have been generated.

We can always point to implementation mistakes and contextual challenges that got in the way of initiatives’ full success. While there is no doubt that initiatives have had an impact on individuals, families, and neigh- borhoods, as a field we don’t have a con- fident answer to whether the same level of impact could have been achieved through more direct, targeted investment in existing programs and organizations.

What are the implications for existing initiatives? Besides Choice and Promise Neighborhoods, the Aspen Roundtable’s helpful catalog of community change ini- tiatives in Appendix 1 lists several initia- tives that were launched in just the past year or two. In particular, the New Com- munities Program in Chicago, a compre- hensive community initiative recently re- funded for a second five-year phase by its

sponsors the MacArthur Foundation and Local Initiatives Support Corporation, has a great deal of promising momentum and local support. A useful strategic exercise for the sponsors and implementers of cur- rent and planned initiatives would be to identify ways in which their initiatives will avoid and overcome the pitfalls faced by the conventional initiative model. Perhaps there are useful insights to be gleaned about ways in which the latest generation of CCIs are circumventing the flaws and limitations I discuss below. My own ad- vice to current initiative leaders would be to make an immediate, focused effort to develop plans for transitioning to a more organic, open-ended, internally champi- oned, and sustained mode of operating.

I don’t believe that this line of think- ing suggests there is no future role at all for initiative-type investments. An external, sole sponsor could use a time- limited investment and design to strategi- cally jump-start local action. Rather than making a five- to ten-year commitment to launching and funding an “initiative,” however, funders should aim within a two- to three-year period to transition ex- plicitly and intentionally to a less circum- scribed, more locally driven and broad- based effort, with the sponsor shifting to a more open-ended strategic partner role.

Taking up the challenge set by this vol- ume’s authors, I will first explore the pros and cons of the initiative model in more detail. I will propose some key elements of a possible alternative approach to com- munity change, including implications for the sponsor’s role, and provide some promising examples that are emerging in the field. I will consider what could be lost by moving away from the long-term initia- tive model and suggest ways to retain the benefits while avoiding the limitations. I’ll

conclude with some thoughts about mov- ing forward as a field.

THE INITIATIVE MODEL: THE