More than three decades after the community development field began to grow by leaps and bounds, community-based development organizations are still taking on the same challenges they did in the 1960s. We are, in this country, always looking for the quick fix, she says.
Community development takes patience, impatience, persistence, and networking.
Results take a long time Results and community impact need to be comparative. When one looks at the deteriorating conditions in low-income communities, then one has to compare what has happened in communities with active CDCs with areas where there is not CDC activity. A new initiative on faith-based development, designed to strengthen partnerships between CDCs and the religious community, was launched in 1997. This project, a collaborative effort with the Ford Foundation and the National Community Development Initiative, focuses primarily on 13 communities around the country. For the last five to seven years we ve been grappling with the organizational capacity of CDCs, she says.