Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Neighborhood Planning
  • Planning Models
  • What is the objective of neighborhood planning?


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Community Development Models
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Rational Planning
  • “Couldn’t people see what he had done?  Why weren’t they grateful?”
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Rational Planning
  • Initiated by government
  • Put aside political, moral, or personal convictions.  Authority comes from professional detachment.
  • Offer judgments as expert advice based on good analysis.
  • Efficiency as a central norm.
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Rational Planning
  • Controlled political participation
  • Represent and seek convergence of divergent interests
  • Generally opposed to transferring power to community organizations
  • Most common role for planner employed by government
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Rational Planning
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"Inherent bias"
  • Inherent bias
  • Who is in the room?
  • How will decisions be made?
  • Types of citizen involvement
  • Does rational planning reflect how change takes place?


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"Does plan meet test of..."
  • Does plan meet test of community education?
  • Government fragmentation
  • Objectivity
  • Does the effort build social capital?
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Benefits of Rational Planning
  • Much better than no planning
  • Useful when rational planning adopts the “equity planning” approach
  • Rational planning reflects reality of complicated adoption and implementation situation
  • Sound plan is a touch-stone
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"Stable,"
  • Stable, sound neighborhood leaders & good base
  • Independent technical assistance
  • Use “equity planning”
  • Carefully select participants
  • Neighborhood meets to monitor & strategize
  • Top levels of govt accept legitimacy of plan
  • Plan engages implementation agencies
  • Plan addresses implementation & planning group stays involved
  • Plan builds social capital
  • Education & empowerment


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Community Organizing
  • Settlement workers live in tenement neighborhoods
  • Establishment of “harmonious whole”
  • Not “contrivances but persons” who will save society
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Saul Alinsky - Industrial Areas Foundation
  • Alinsky begins work in Chicago in 1930s.  Approach focuses on social work & sociology.
  • Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1972)
  • Industrial Areas Foundation
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 Power
  • “Ability to act”.
  • Leads to capacity to identify issues
  • Creates motivation to improve conditions
  • Humans nature: to be effective, improve self, help neighbors, enhance conditions
  • Organization is the means to power
  • From community “disorganization” to organization
  • Power builds organization
  • Organizer plays critical role


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Issues & Action
  • Importance of people doing for themselves
  • Community defines issues
  • Immediate, specific, realizable issues
  • High symbolic value



  • Success fosters membership & participation
  • Wide-based membership through multiple issues
  • No lapse in action
  • Action creates communication & learning


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Local leadership
  • Only way to reach people is through their own leaders.
  • Invites organizer & planner into community.
  • Communicates with and mobilizes community
  • Organizer builds local leadership



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Organizer
  • Essential to start, build, maintain organization
  • Skills in org. building, power analysis, tactics, communications, building leadership, education
  • Choices of action & disposition of resources
  • Sets judgment aside
  • Skills (knowledge, connections) better than love
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Tactics
  • Rules are made by those in power. Necessary to challenge rules of “proper” and “legal”
  • Act within experience of supporters & outside experience of opponents


  • Use the community’s resources
  • Have fun
  • Identify target, polarize, isolate, personalize
  • Address issue in person


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Tactics
  • Keep pressure on.  Don’t stay with action that takes too long
  • Use opponent’s reaction
  • Make opposition live by own rules



  • Take advantage of division of interests within opposition
  • Have alternative or solution ready
  • Be willing to compromise


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IAF & Interfaith Organizations
  • Difficulty with durability of Alinsky’s organizations
  • IAF establishes long term relationships with faith-based community organizations
  • Values of faith-based groups incorporated into organizing
  • Expressly multi-cultural
  • IAF stabilized organizationally
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"Door knocking and enrolling dues-paying..."
  • Door knocking and enrolling dues-paying membership is primary organizing approach
  • Generally avoids working with existing organizations and leadership
  • Continuous political action
  • Organizing in many communities at same time on major issue, e.g. livable wage



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Building Communities from the Inside Out
  • Community “asset-based” approach
  • “Internally focused”
  • “Relationship driven”
  • Necessary but not sufficient
  • Embraces organizing, planning, and economic development
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Community Assets Map
  • Neighborhood regeneration is based on locating all the available local abilities, capacities and assets
  • And beginning to connect them in ways that multiplies their power and effectiveness
  • Establishes in each community institution sense of responsibility for neighborhood
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Capacity Inventory
  • In strong communities individuals’ capacities are know, valued, and utilized.
  • Inventory is basis of community building
    • Personal skills
    • Community work skills
    • Entrepreneurship skills and interests.
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Releasing Individual Capacities
  • Assets of youth, seniors, low income, disabled, and so on.
  • Productively connect individuals to:
    • other local residents
    • citizen associations and non-profits
    • public institutions
    • private companies
  • Mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationships created
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Tapping Power of Local Organizations
  • De Tocqueville: America’s great genius is creating associations and taking action to solve problems
  • Church, support, self-help, service, special interest, health, sports, etc. groups
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Tapping Power of Local Organizations
  • Conduct inventory of local associations, through:
    • Community newspapers and directories
    • Local meeting places such as libraries, community centers, churches
    • Contacting individuals such as leaders and a sample of residents
  • Inventory of current services.  Potential for future service
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Tapping Power of Local Organizations
  • Resources of local churches as example:
    • staff & church members
    • facilities, materials & equipment
    • Moral authority and call to community service
    • economic resources
  • Create new partnerships with groups, associations, businesses, and institutions
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Rebuilding the Community Economy
  • Economic development through local institutions.
  • Alternative credit institutions (“Community Development Financial Institutions”)
    • Community Development Credit Unions
    • Community Development Loan Funds
  • Recycling physical assets, e.g. vacant land, abandoned buildings, underutilized space
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Redevelopable Property
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Redeveloping Abandoned & Underutilized Property
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“Conditions” of successful action
  • Adequate and on-going monetary and human technical resources
  • Grass roots organizing
  • Strong, direct ties with public officials; technical, legal and financial experts; other community organizations and coalitions
  • “Creative tension” in relationships
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Final comments - Streets of Hope
  • “The heart is far more important than the head”
  • “Being is more important than doing”
  • “I would like us to be a community of integrity”