THE CASE FOR TRANSITIONING TO A DIFFERENT PHASE OF

INVESTMENT

The time has come to reach beyond an

extended “proof-of-concept” phase, dur- ing which we saw successive waves of investment in one-off philanthropic initia- tives, with varied purposes and designs, produce quite mixed results. As this book points out, much was learned from these

approaches. Ultimately, however, such an open-ended and loosely focused invest- ment approach has inherent constraints. If place-based community change work is ever to produce the broader social and economic realignment that most philan- thropic investors hope for, the sector will need to come to terms with the limitations of an approach that consists of discrete and disconnected initiatives.

If we accept that the time has come for comprehensive community change work to shift toward another phase of in- vestment, then a new agenda is needed to guide that transition. Such an agenda should clearly set out what must change about how this work is being carried out, and it should frame where more empha- sis is now needed to bring this work to greater scale. Few would argue that the road forward should simply involve an- other wave of investments in community- specific initiatives.

The new agenda should include some more thoughtful, higher-impact strategies for linking community-based and other collaborative efforts together to encour- age broader institutional shifts in how public resources are deployed to address chronic issues of poverty and disinvest- ment in lower-income communities. Just as different investment strategies are called for at different phases of product development, the field of comprehensive community change now requires a dis- tinct new bundle of philanthropic invest- ments to help move the work to a more dominant position in the broader market- place of poverty-alleviation approaches.

Some key components of this next- level strategy are relatively clear:

e We need to concentrate more on clarifying, consolidating, and com-

municating the practices that we now believe work.

e We need to attract and deploy more significant philanthropic and pub- lic dollars from a broader range of sources—nationally, regionally, and locally.

e We need to focus more on linking in-

vestments together, breaking down programmatic silos, and moving from very small to broader geographies.

e We need to be more deliberate in ty-

ing this work to the policy and insti- tutional supports required to achieve broader and more convincing results. But how do we encourage a more coherent and integrated investment ap- proach within a community of practice where there still is so much diversity of thinking and where funder investment decisions are so decentralized? This is a daunting challenge in a field filled with independent thinkers who may acknowl- edge a shared interest in the potential of place-based community change but are also protective of their autonomy, some- what wary of formalized collaborations and partnerships, and generally comfort- able following their own lights when it comes to the details of program design.

A more coherent, broadly endorsed scaling-up strategy would have to be “roomy” enough to allow for consider- able variation in execution. And it would have to ensure that players from the fund- ing community’s many subsectors—from national to locally based, large to small, broad-missioned to narrowly focused— can see clear roles for themselves and recognize payoffs from the work. These practical requirements should not be viewed as impossible design constraints but, rather, as the necessary attributes of

a robust, multilayered investment strat- egy with great potential for benefiting the entire field.

It is difficult to imagine that the comprehensive community change field could ever muster the influence needed to move a broader antipoverty agenda without more agreement on where the field is now. The publication of this third Voices from the Field volume provides a timely opportunity for those who are deeply invested in this work to frame the current situation and take up the chal- lenge of guiding the transition toward a field-wide strategy with potential for broader impact.

The writings in this volume provide an excellent and well-grounded point of departure for the conceptual work needed to transform current place-based efforts into something more ambitious. Part I of this volume traces how the field has evolved from efforts spread across programmatic sectors and involving var- ied sponsoring institutions toward a pro- gressively broader and more intercon- nected array of efforts that draw strength from each other and can more easily be seen as related. This volume also sum- marizes the outcomes these efforts have produced, while analyzing why so many initiatives have not realized results of the scale and persuasiveness imagined by their designers. It considers several aspects of the work—including the roles of sponsoring institutions, areas of pro- grammatic focus, priorities for capacity building, and relationships within and outside target neighborhoods—that help frame the debate about where addition- al investments may be most needed to achieve larger gains.

ADDRESSING CONCEPTUAL AND