Maintaining Product-Process Balance in Community Antipoverty Initiatives

Increasingly, antipoverty interventions have focused their efforts at the community or neighborhood level. Intervening at a community level allows initiatives to target neighborhood market conditions driving the availability of jobs and affordable housing and community-level social processes connected to poverty. Operating at the community or neighborhood level also increases an initiative's ability to leverage resources from within the community and to customize the intervention to account for contextual variables unique to the neighborhood. The term community initiative refers to any intervention targeted at the community or neighborhood level, including Community Development Corporations (CDCs), Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCIs), Empowerment Zones (EZs), and Enterprise Communities (ECs). These initiatives vary widely in their structure, function, and size, but they also have much in common (see Halpern, 1995, and Naparstek & Dooley, 1997, for discussions of the various types of community initiatives). The activities of community initiatives generally center around two tasks: producing outputs and building capacity. Common outputs include new or rehabilitated affordable housing units, new or rehabilitated commercial space, new businesses, job placements, and improved social services. Capacity building refers to attempts to increase a community's ability to act on its own behalf to address its needs. Capacity-building efforts may be focused on residents, a community organization, a network of community organizations, or some combination of these. Although the utility of producing outputs is obvious, the need to build capacity within distressed communities is perhaps less obvious but equally crucial in improving neighborhood conditions. Capacity-building efforts are designed to increase awareness of existing assets, strengthen leadership, increase collaboration, and enhance skills through technical assistance. Increasing a community's capacity is important because it activates resources available in the community to address the problems. This improves the sustainability of programs because over the long haul, external resources typically diminish. Activities that build community capacity are also important because they are often instrumental to gaining and maintaining community support--another important factor in sustainability. Community initiatives often garner great clout and legitimacy from the perception that the people stand behind the initiatives, and the initiatives exist to carry out a mandate from the community (Mayer, 1984; Sullivan, 1993). This perception broadens the initiatives' sphere of influence and imparts political power that they might not otherwise enjoy, and enhances their access to local politicians and policymakers. Capacity building is also the primary strategy for addressing social and cultural factors that perpetuate poverty. Prolonged community-wide deprivation results in widespread joblessness and increases in crime, delinquency, and instability within family households, which subsequently undermine the perceived self-efficacy of residents and the social cohesion of the community (Wilson, 1995). Capacity-building activities bring neighbors together to address community problems and help restore a sense of community and hope that is often lacking in poor and low-income neighborhoods. PRODUCT-PROCESS TENSION The need for community antipoverty interventions to both produce outputs and build capacity often results in what has been termed "product--process tension" (Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families, 1997). Initiative stakeholders wish to bring about immediate, tangible changes in poor communities through what they produce. People want to see homes being built, businesses opening up, better health care, and improved public safety, for example. On the other hand, stakeholders also wish to build capacity of residents and local institutions to address problems themselves over the long term by leading them through a step-by-step process of change. …