Complex Solutions for a Complicated World -- Letter from the Publisher
by Joel Bookman
Published: December 12, 2011
Communities are complex. For those of us in comprehensive community development that’s not news. Trying to rebuild neighborhoods through comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) is a complicated, challenging and sometimes over-whelming endeavor. The problems and opportunities can seem endless, as practitioners wrestle with issues from housing to safety, economic development to health, education to the environment.
To address these issues, community development organizations have just as long a list of strategies: engage residents, create visions, craft consensus, draft plans, develop projects, launch programs. All the while, they hunt for resources, advocate for policy change and try to measure their success. On a tight budget. In a troubled economy. With dwindling public support.
It would be a difficult undertaking for a heavily resourced corporate giant like Apple or McKinsey & Company to analyze, strategize and implement successfully. In fact, some heavily resourced giants—the federal government, large cities and major foundations—have tried their hand at transforming communities for decades, with mixed success at best.
And yet, the number and scope of CCIs are growing, in the United States and beyond. LISC, Purpose Built Communities, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Canada’s Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement have programs that trumpet comprehensive approaches to complex urban problems in hundreds of target neighborhoods with what appears to be, at least in some cases, very promising results. Through the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development, practitioners participate in workshops, training, and conferences to share the lessons and best practices from these examples.
But, as Hamlet might say, “Ay, there’s the rub.” As Institute Director Eileen Figel and I visit sites around the country, we find that everywhere we go, researchers, practitioners, funders and public officials are struggling with some basic questions, even as many CCI programs are providing real-world benefits to their neighborhoods.
- What exactly is comprehensive community development?
- How do you do it best?
- If communities are complex, with a vast array of issues, how do you select the right strategies and interventions to create the greatest impact?
- What is success—and how do you measure it?
As I said, neighborhoods are complex and comprehensive community development is complicated. So it’s probably not a surprise that the questions—let alone the answers—are complicated too. To keep the conversation going and to keep learning more, the Institute sponsors Research Roundtables, seminars and this Journal.
In this issue’s Q & A, for example, we asked long-time CCI veteran Xavier de Souza Briggs, who recently left his position as the associate director for general government programs at the federal Office of Management and Budget to return to MIT, about what opportunities and risks face the field. He discusses place-based programs to strengthen families, how to rethink community development’s relationship with the criminal justice and health care systems, training community members in leadership and consensus building, and more. It’s a fascinating, wide-ranging and ambitious collection of ideas.
But he also talks about the importance of choosing interventions that are carefully targeted to produce measurable impact, saying, “I believe the top opportunities will come where there is compelling proof of impact, because fiscal impact is the coin of the realm now and will be for a while.” In this context, it’s more important than ever that CCIs need to find a niche and select the right strategies.
Another facet of the choices we face is examined in our new “Up for Discussion” department, where two renowned housing experts, Edward Goetz and Myron Orfield, face off over place-based vs. regional strategies to build new affordable housing. Do we concentrate our efforts in low- and moderate-income city neighborhoods, or do we emphasize affordable housing in suburban areas to redress decades of racial segregation that has perpetuated inequality and discrimination? It is a thoughtful, vigorous and important debate, touching on issues of social justice, equity and the law. If communities are complicated, with a vast array of issues, how do you select the right strategies and interventions to create the greatest impact—and for whom?
A signature aspect of comprehensive community initiatives is how they weave together many issues and programs that are traditionally seen as existing in separate realms. In decades past, community developers hadn’t typically worked closely with public health officials, for instance. In Xuemei Zhu and James Sallis’ paper starting on page 9, they explain the research behind “active living,” a new, more comprehensive way of tackling obesity that is focused on issues like community open space, public safety, a robust local commercial corridor, and successful neighborhood schools. That’s a familiar list to anyone working in comprehensive community development.
How can community development corporations and other neighborhood groups connect to public health efforts such as these? The ambitious new federal Let’s Move program to fight childhood obesity, headed by First Lady Michelle Obama, includes many active living ideas: safer routes to school to encourage walking, more playgrounds and safer streets, schools that encourage physical activity, access to healthy food. By incorporating and partnering with these types of programs, we can bring more resources and momentum to the goals of strengthening our communities.
This issue also features two reviews of publications that examine how complexity theory can be used to tease out exactly how comprehensive community development works. With roots in ecological and biological systems, complexity theory attempts to find patterns and systems where many variables interact to create a unique whole—certainly one good definition of a neighborhood.
Anne Kubisch, director of the Aspen Roundtable on Community Change, takes a closer look at complexity theory and leadership in emergent community projects in her review of a recent paper in the Community Development Journal. In communities that are complex adaptive systems—that is, “non-linear, emergent, dynamic, open, networked, interdisciplinary, adaptive, cooperative, multi-agent, interactive, collective and systemic”—how does complexity science offer a useful tool to analyze our work?
In his book Development Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use, Michael Quinn Patton attempts to answer the question “How do we know that what we are doing works?” In Sarah Rankin’s review, she examines his approach, a new category of “development evaluation” for programs that are always adapting to new circumstances. Both Rankin and Kubisch find that complexity theory might hold some very useful answers down the road.
We end this issue of the Journal, like each issue,withthe reflections of a longtime community development veteran. Gordon Chin served the Chinatown CDC for 34 years with passion, creativity and dignity. His stories of intergenerational learning, collaboration, and leadership are inspiring. How do you do it? One way is to listen and learn from one of our field’s many well-respected leaders, Gordon Chin.
Joel Bookman
Managing Director
The Institute for Comprehensive Community Development
December 2011
Posted in Journal Volume 2, Number 2 -- December, 2011