Community Building

The Civic Context

The first and most common context in which the term is used is that of civic action to promote collective, or community, well-being. In this context, community building has at least three defining traits: problemsolving objectives that involve important public interests (as opposed to business or other private interests), an emphasis on collective action (sometimes including professionals, but emphasizing leadership by nonprofessional citizen clients), and a set of hoped-for links between the community thus created or strengthened on one hand and the target social problem on the other.

While the term community building has traveled across borders in this first context, it is especially popular in the United States and often includes at least an implicit critique of more traditional, expert-dominated, top-down approaches to meeting needs or solving problems. Especially in the 1990s, community building took on a second meaning, becoming a way of distinguishing creative civic action, primarily at the local level, that engaged citizen clients in key decisions and in their implementation, and that created connections—community—that lasted beyond the immediate program or project.

Consider the example of a public health program that aims to increase child immunization rates significantly in order to prevent disease and lower mortality in a particular geographic area or within a defined social group. Locals—those who live in the area or are members of the target group—may fear health professionals or be unaware of the full set of risks that childhood diseases entail; they may also favor their own, traditional remedies over vaccines. More basic still, locals may be preoccupied with a variety of other urgent concerns—meeting shelter, income, and other day-to-day needs, for example. Many social problem-solving efforts face these or similar barriers. Health professionals who seek to promote the aims of the program through informal parent networks in the area (or group) or by recruiting community insiders to validate the program's objectives may be described as building community in order to improve health outcomes.

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