Kim Woods only

"Chapter 1 A Look at Communities

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Learning Objectives

Chapter Outline

Case Study 1: The Smithville Neighborhood 2

Case Study 2: The Town of Middle View 3

Variations on the Theme 6

Summary 8

What is a community? The word community can be divided into two parts: “common” and “unity.” Communities are comprised of people who share common bonds, often feel responsible for the well-being of one another, and work together for the betterment of life for all. There are several types of communities including geographic, partial, dispersed, interest, and virtual, but most community organizing is done in geographic communities.

Information Management

Understanding and Mastery: Performing elementary community-needs assessment

Critical Thinking Question

Choose a place with which you are already familiar. Drive or walk through it, carefully observing its sights, sounds, and smells. What are your overall impressions of the community’s assets and needs? What led to these impressions? What immediately jumps out at you as likely to need attention?

Geographic communities are places where people live in proximity to one another and share the experiences of daily life. Geographic community organizing involves shared efforts, often over many years, by people committed to improving the quality of life for everyone living in a particular geographic locale. Places chosen for community organizing frequently have a sense of history. They have names, recognized boundaries and enough services to enable residents to live comfortably without having to leave the area. For instance, many places that are suitable for geographic community organizing have elementary schools, churches and other places of worship, doctors’ offices, service organizations, fire and police protection, municipal governments, grocery stores, and community parks. Some examples of geographic places that you might choose as the focus of community organizing include:

City neighborhoods consisting of several blocks, often with historical names like “Little Italy,” “Chinatown,” “the French Quarter,” or “Chelsea.”

Incorporated towns and villages of less than 25,000 people (larger cities seem to work better when organized as neighborhoods).

Rural school districts encompassing a large geographic area but a relatively small population.

Case Study 1: The Smithville Neighborhood

Imagine that you are walking on a major street in a medium-sized city in the Northeastern United States. You are in the downtown area around 6 p.m. on a warm June evening and head west on the way to a friend’s house, passing through a section of city that has been gentrified with many bustling small shops, upscale restaurants, and sidewalk cafes. A number of well-dressed people chat in front of the gilded entrance of a live theater company. There are comfortable benches and flower gardens. Street lights start to come on and white lights twinkle from the trees. At the border of the shopping district, renovated brownstones look like upscale single family residences. A uniformed police officer says “good evening” as you pass.

As you head further west, you enter Smithville, a so-called inner city neighborhood where you note that the ambience is changing. You notice more ethnic groceries, pawn shops, and second-hand stores. Most are closed for the evening with steel folding gates covering their doors and windows. The curbs and sidewalks are broken; there are no trash receptacles, and food wrappers and other small items tumble in the wind. A few nearby houses are boarded up. You see several social service agencies, including a local homeless shelter, a soup kitchen, a drug rehab center, and a group home for the developmentally disabled. Gang graffiti is painted on the corner of a building you pass. Although it’s getting dark, many school-aged children are still outside shouting and laughing while small groups of young men and women hang out on the street corners. An occasional ambulance or police car siren can be heard, along with the sound of firecrackers or perhaps gunfire a few streets away. Several people sitting on their front steps loudly play the guitar or radio, and gospel music comes from a storefront church.

As you reach the corner, you see a colorful mural depicting smiling people of all races. On the next block, you pass a community garden and a small “pick-up” basketball game on a litter-strewn city playground. Several mothers with their babies chat as they carry clothes into the local laundromat. A family skitters across the street without the safety of a crosswalk because there are none in the area. At the end of the street, an elderly woman waters a flower box on her porch.

Turning onto a side street toward your friend’s house, you notice that some of the houses are well cared for with small, neat front yards while others are boarded up and in dire need of repair. Several empty lots are covered with sharp gravel. Next to these single-family homes are multi-story apartment complexes in the flat-roofed “modern” style that now looks outdated. At the first complex, children play in the parking lot next to a swing set with no swings while gray-haired folks sit in lawn chairs in front of the second complex. Teenage boys and girls walk by hand in hand. Everyone seems to be enjoying the evening.

Your friend’s house is tucked away on a small lot toward the end of a one-way street. She has invited you over for a cup of coffee and is an active member of the Smithville Neighborhood Association. She asks you about your impressions of the neighborhood and shares her own, emphasizing its strengths, weaknesses, hopes, and dreams.

She shares some of the history of Smithville and the Neighborhood Organization. “Smithville” is a portion of the city named for John Smith who, in the mid-nineteenth century, chose the ten-block-by-fifteen-block area as the site of the first iron furnace and its company housing because it was close to a navigable river on the east, a railroad line on the west, the city center on the south, and a coach and carriage route on the north. The land was empty when Smith chose it, but the Smithville valley was soon identified as a city neighborhood. For decades the predominately wooden frame houses were filled with Scots-Irish iron and steel workers, later with Eastern Europeans and then Italians. During World War II, these white Europeans were joined by a few African Americans from the Deep South who found good jobs for the war effort. The 1950s into the late 1970s were prosperous for everyone. The steel mills began to fail in the 1980s as production was moved overseas. The neighborhood declined precipitously after the loss of the steel industry. Many people moved from the neighborhood, abandoning their properties. Those who stayed were unable to find good jobs and were unable to maintain their former standard of living. The neighborhood population dropped from 25,000 in the 1960 census to just 15,000 in the 1980 census, while the real median household income dropped $10,000 in the same period. In the mid-1990s, a group of concerned residents formed the Smithville Neighborhood Organization. Although things are far from perfect as you noticed in your walking tour, things improved somewhat after the turn of the twenty-first century. Air and water quality have improved. New jobs have been created in medicine, the arts, and clean energy. Recently, immigrants from Guyana and the Caribbean have been added to the diverse mix and are known for the improvements they have made in once-abandoned properties. The various races and ethnicities get along reasonably well. While there are still numerous problems in Smithville, those who are involved with the Neighborhood Organization are feeling hopeful. Your friend invites you to join their efforts by becoming a paid intern through the AmeriCorps and even offers you a place to live in the neighborhood.

When you get home, you take notes on what you have experienced, emphasizing the positive aspects of the neighborhood, noting some of the likely challenges, and finally considering some of the places where there may be conflict among people or their goals. You have made a good start toward an analysis of an urban neighborhood.

Case Study 2: The Town of Middle View

Some time after your visit to the urban Smithville neighborhood, you decide that you would like to explore a rural village to compare and contrast urban and rural communities. You choose to visit the Town of Middle View because you have an older friend who has recently retired there. Middle View is located in upstate New York. It has 4,500 full-time residents with a weekend summer population approaching 20,000. It is comprised of the central Village of Middle View and several smaller hamlets. It shares a single consolidated school district with three other rural towns. You arrive by car at the town limits on a crisp clear autumn morning, driving along a two-lane state highway that follows a sparkling river. As you drive along, you pass different kinds of rural housing including a few prosperous farms with large barns, well-cared-for farm houses and large herds of dairy cattle, suburban-style houses set on moderate-size lots, and two mobile home parks. The first such park is attractive with mature trees and landscaped flower beds. Its mobile homes are set on permanent foundations with large lots. There are outdoor and indoor play areas for the children and a small grocery store for staples. The second is far more rundown and fits the stereotype of a “trailer park.” The lots are small, the lanes are muddy and narrow, and the trailers are set on cement blocks without permanent foundations. There has been at least one recent house fire, and some of the remains still stand. As you drive near the river, there are advertisements for campgrounds and rental cabins. These signs of human habitation are interspersed with long stretches of a colorful mixed hardwood forest and dark green pines. You pass through a hamlet with a convenience store/gasoline station, a community church, a small restaurant, and a cluster of wooden houses.

At last you arrive in the Village of Middle View, an incorporated settlement surrounded by the Town of Middle View. There are about 900 full-time village residents. From mid-June to Labor Day, the number of Middle View Village residents swells to about 4,000 on weekends and 2,500 during the week. The full-time village residents are divided into three major groups: “native” families, some of whom have lived in area since before the American Revolution; a group of solid citizens; and business people who originally moved to the area from Major City and its suburbs twenty-five to thirty years ago—although most still speak of themselves as being “from the city.” In addition, there is a growing group of upper middle class people who are recent retirees and have chosen to live in their now winterized “summer” homes. Members of the latter two groups see themselves as community leaders and often serve on the town board, the village board, and/or the school board, while the “natives” often live back in the mountains and live by doing odd jobs. They rarely, if ever, participate directly in civic concerns but are often at the heart of informal community caring: holding fund-raising spaghetti dinners to raise money to pay for others’ medical bills, participating as volunteer firemen and emergency medical technicians (EMTs), swapping services such as car repairs, checking on the elderly, and dozens of other acts of kindness.

The village boasts five Protestant churches, a Roman Catholic church, a bank, two or three small manufacturing plants, the consolidated school, a modest-sized supermarket, several small town parks, a library, a consolidated fire district, the Town Hall, a senior citizens’ center, an outreach medical center, two professional offices, two motels, and three restaurants. All are strung along the main street that has one traffic light.

Most houses are on side streets. Many are small and rather close together with tidy lawns. They are mostly of wood-frame construction and are about one hundred years old. Well-cared-for homes are interspersed with dilapidated ones. One subdivision with ranch style homes on the outskirts of the village resembles a suburb. At one end of Main Street are a few large, restored Victorian homes; two have been converted into bed and breakfasts. There is a medium-sized lake connected to a scenic river. Both are suitable for fishing and small boats and are surrounded with summer homes and a growing number of winterized year-round residences. The village provides two public beaches, tennis and basketball courts, and two medium-sized parks with picnic pavilions. There are community-wide celebrations scattered throughout the year.

When you reach your friend’s house, she takes you to the local diner for a mid-afternoon slice of pie and tells you that, although the area seems pristine and beautiful, problems lurk literally under the surface. Although there is a village water system, the water mains are nearly a century old and periodically break during the harsh winters. The whole area depends on antiquated individual septic systems which were not much of a problem when the permanent population was small, but greater numbers of year-round residents have put increasing stress on the rocky soil which cannot absorb the increased sewage. The water table as well as the lake and river system are threatened. Water and sewer needs are aggravated by the bedrock that is located very close to the surface and by antiquated state laws and regulations that preclude new approaches to processing human waste, such as self-composting toilets.

For many years, lumbering in the forests and paper production in nearby mills provided a decent income for working class area residents. Most of the paper mills have now closed, and much of the lumbering has gone to the Scandinavian countries. Locals now make a hand-to-mouth living doing a variety of odd jobs for the summer residents and retired people. Businesses have been slowly closing. Most of the campgrounds, motels, and rental cottages are owned by older couples who are struggling to make a living as fewer city families can afford long vacations. Winters with little or no snow have ruined businesses that depend on snowmobiling and other winter sports, so seasonal businesses that thrive in the summer and early fall struggle to remain open during the winter. There are a few economic bright spots, such as an active, informal coalition that has been working to increase tourism. Recent reactivation of passenger train and freight service after a seventy-year hiatus has increased both summer and winter visitors. On balance, the local economy seems to be bobbing up and down as businesses open and close without apparent reason.

On the school front, shrinking class sizes and budget limitations make it difficult to maintain high quality educational services. Two years ago, because of a proposed 12% property tax hike, the school district budget failed in the largest voter turnout in school district history! As a result, heightening tension now exists between the residents and school district, which has trouble getting budgetary support because incomes of young families are low and most older homeowners are on fixed incomes with no grandchildren in the schools. The gap between the property owners and the schools is exacerbated by the fact that most of the public school teachers live outside of the district and are seen as burdens on the shrinking tax base.

There is also a split along economic lines regarding the present and future prospects facing teens and young adults of the school district. For many years, a relatively small number of talented young adults have participated in school events, have gotten good grades, have gone to college, and later have obtained good jobs outside of the area. In contrast, students from economically poorer homes have “faded” from school in ninth grade, have dropped out as sophomores or juniors, and soon have had children outside of committed relationships—thus creating a subgroup of rootless “twenty-somethings” and their young children without much hope for the future. Some of these teens and young adults have turned to delinquent behaviors. There is a surprising amount of alcohol abuse, depression, and vandalism among teens and young adults throughout the Town and Village. On a positive note, however, the Middle School has recently initiated an after-school program targeted toward at-risk youngsters. Participants in this grant-based program have shown improvement in their school work.

Unlike Smithville, Middle View does not have a formal community organization. A relatively small group of committed citizens are active in local politics, the local churches, the Chamber of Commerce, and the local service club. These people know one another and are often responsible for new positive initiatives aimed at improving the area.

You stay with your friend for a few days. You tell her that you are tiring of your life in Industrial City and are thinking of moving to Middle View. During your visit, the two of you attend a Town Council meeting, eat in several of the local restaurants, chat with her neighbors, and kayak on the river. You drive back to your home two hours away in Industrial City and think about life in Middle View. Once home, you write notes on the strengths and weaknesses of the Town and Village of Middle View, pose additional questions, and think about some possible changes that could improve the lives of its people.

Variations on the Theme

The urban and rural geographic case studies described above provide rich descriptive illustrations of the many concepts covered in this book. However, many of the same principles and practices can be applied to partial communities, dispersed communities, communities of interest, and virtual communities. A brief description of each of these communities follows.

Although community organizing frequently focuses on “complete communities” (places like neighborhoods and villages that offer most of the goods and services residents need), partial communities (i.e., smaller residential areas and social institutions) may also benefit from organizing efforts. Occasionally their residents may want to use community organizing techniques to address concerns such as poor maintenance, noise, drug abuse, pets, pest control, rent increases, unfair enforcement of rules and regulations, or interpersonal and intergroup conflict. On a more positive note, they may want to increase neighborliness, improve the appearance of the facility, support one another in time of need, or share celebrative events. Suitable locations for this kind of partial or limited geographically based organizing include:

Apartment complexes

Mobile home parks

Rural hamlets

Subdivisions

City blocks

“Complete institutions” (e.g., prisons, college campuses, schools, nursing homes, military installations)

Planning and Evaluating

Understanding and Mastery: Analysis and assessment of the needs of clients or client groups

Critical Thinking Question

Observe a place where people live and/or work together in close proximity over an extended period of time and consider the following questions: How does the physical environment impact the sense of mutuality or “common-unity”? Who participates, what do they do, and why do they do it? What are some written rules and regulations that govern interactions? What “unwritten rules” seem to apply? Would you like to live or work there? What specific factors led you to your conclusion?

Dispersed communities (or diasporas) are groups of people who share a common sense of purpose, history, and a sense of duty to one another, although they may be scattered across the world. Many ethnic and religious groups—such as Mennonites, Jews, Muslims, North American First Peoples, Roma, Africans, Haitians, and Chinese—primarily identify themselves by their shared heritage, commitment to one another, and sometimes their homeland rather than their current geographic locations. Immigrant communities have always been characterized by a sense of common culture, continuing allegiance to a homeland, and caring networks. Today improved communication tools and transportation have made it easier for people to retain close ties with their homelands and have made travel between countries much easier than formerly.

Explore more about the importance of migrant hometown associations. Consider how immigrant hometown associations might be helpful to people in the home countries as well as migrants dispersed throughout the world.

The possibility of continuing close ties has, in turn, led to new ways of solidifying the sense of community. Foremost among these are hometown associations, membership organizations that enable people to connect their new homes (i.e., their “communities of residence”) with their old homes (i.e., their “communities of origin”). Hometown associations have sprung up all over the world. They connect migrants with one another, provide them with mutual support in their new homes, and provide a vehicle to send monetary support back to their hometowns. Members quite often think of themselves as belonging to a single community that exists in several places: a hometown in their country of origin, an ethnic neighborhood in their country of residence, and a community of others from their hometown that are living in similar ethnic neighborhoods. Hometown associations are examples of ways migrants organize themselves to maintain their culture identity across the miles.

Human Systems

Understanding and Mastery: Emphasis on context and the role of diversity in determining and meeting human needs.

Critical Thinking Question

Explore the experiences of a migrant population that interests you. What are the strengths for immigrants of maintaining strong ties among people from the same hometown? What are the advantages for the hometowns? What problems, if any, might arise from maintaining strong ties to one’s country of origin rather than focusing on one’s new community?

Communities of interest are primarily organized around people with shared concerns or interests that are important components of their individual identities but are not geographically or culturally bound. Common interests range from recreation and the arts to medical problems and social ills. These communities often begin as quasi-groups of people who do not know one another but share common characteristics, interests, or concerns. For example, the Harley Davidson motorcycle community has “members” all over the world. As individuals, these people simply share a common interest, but they become a true community when they begin to communicate on a regular basis and develop social ties based on their shared interest in Harley Davidson motorcycles. Communities of interest may become formal organizations or remain loosely tied. Members of communities of interest often find ways to meet face to face through conventions, conferences, and other means—although face-to-face interaction is not absolutely necessary.

Human Systems

Understanding and Mastery: Organizational structures of communities

Critical Thinking Question

What differentiates a community of interest from an aggregation of people who just happen to purchase the same product or attend the same sporting event? What specific processes turn a loosely structured group of strangers into a cohesive whole with a sense of their common-unity?

Explore a community of interest by choosing a personal interest or passion and using a combination of personal inquiries and Web-based research to identify any organizations that are related to it. Pay special attention to the factors that led people to develop this community of interest, ways the community is structured locally and beyond, activities that create a sense of “common-unity” among members, the processes and methods that are used to promote communication and community building, and how well (or poorly) the various levels and elements of the community of interest seem to work with one another. Consider what this exploration has taught you about the nature of communities of interest.

Engage in social networking communities such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Second Life or a specialized network devoted to an area of interest. Consider ways in which social networks are similar to face-to-face communities as well as ways they may differ.

Virtual communities are a new and constantly evolving phenomenon that exists online and shares some characteristics of all communities, such as formal and informal rules of interaction, role expectations, primary relationships, subsystems to handle various issues, thematic boundaries, and stability across time. Virtual communities do not require face-to-face interaction but can fill many of the functions once reserved for these personal interactions. For instance, you may find that Facebook and other social utilities can fulfill part of your individual need for emotional support and friendship.

As virtual communities bring together people with shared interests who may live miles apart, participants don’t always have to play their day-to-day social roles but may rather reinvent themselves or create an avatar (visual representation of themselves) that participates with other avatars in a virtual world. However, virtual communities are relatively new, and so insights into how they operate are still emerging.

Assess your comprehension of Community Types by completing this quiz.

Summary

In this introductory chapter, you were first introduced to the concept of community and then took a virtual tour of two very different fictitious geographic communities: Smithville, a city neighborhood, and the rural Town and Village of Middle View. This virtual tour is intended to help you imagine what it might feel like to live in these very different kinds of communities and begin to think about the kinds of organizing efforts that might be needed to improve their quality of life. They will be used as examples and illustrations throughout this book. (Please note Smithville and Middle View are based on many real geographic communities, but they are fictitious so do not attempt to connect them to specific communities, organizations, or people.) The chapter emphasized complete geographic communities because they are the most common targets of community organizing, although some time was spent on other kinds of communities that can also benefit from the ideas and skills you will learn here, including partial geographic communities (e.g., blocks, apartment complexes, schools, and institutions), dispersed communities (comprised of people who may be scattered throughout the world but who identify with a common “home”), communities of interest (such as hobbyists, co-religionists, scholars, and others who experience a sense of common-unity and belonging through shared commitments and experiences), and virtual communities that have emerged with the advent of social networking. In the chapters that follow, you will journey through analytical frameworks and practical ideas that will enable you to be an active participant in community organizing activities wherever you find yourself.

Assess your analysis and evaluation of this chapter’s contents by completing the Chapter Review."