Community Empowerment

Community

The literature leads us to three general definitions of community, based on geography, common interests, and ascribed characteristics. Geographic community connotes definitive boundaries such as streets, railroad tracks, or other physical landmarks. In most community empowerment discussions, this definition, with a focus on geographic subareas of a city, is the functional unit of work and analysis.

The community of common interests is not necessarily bounded. Religious, cultural, ethnic, and social interest groups that may have originally migrated to a common neighborhood now may span the metropolitan area. Yet they still reunite to socialize or even strategize around specific actions. In limited instances, conventional community empowerment approaches feature these communities of common interest, such as faith-based community development organizations and activities. Yet even those groups tend to be focused geographically, within the vicinity of a church's location.

The community of ascribed characteristics is often considered an aggregate without subscribed membership. Demographers, marketers, politicians, organizers, and planners ascribe interests to aggregates of people (e.g., African Americans, low-income families, the elderly) that they may or may not share. Policies and programs are targeted to this aggregate. However, once a discernible group gels around a specific issue, that aggregate becomes a community of sorts.

Empowerment

The root word, power, reflects an ability to influence change, to promote or prohibit it. Empowerment is the process that allows people to exert influence over decisions that affect their lives and well-being. Community empowerment refers to a process whereby residents of disadvantaged geographic areas gain the means to influence policies, programs, and practices that affect their collective lives.

Advocacy and Organizing

Neighborhood block clubs and community-based nonprofit organizations have formed to oppose toxic waste dump sites and real estate development projects that promote gentrification or to lobby for more police support to combat neighborhood crime and even to press governments to preserve local landmarks and programs that reflect the artistic and cultural traditions of a particular area. With the emergence of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in the late 1950s, former union organizer Saul Alinsky coached community residents in unionlike, direct-action tactics such as boycotts, pickets, and other confrontational techniques aimed at influencing the practices of slum landlords, exploitive merchants, and unresponsive public and private institutions. Alinsky's IAF-trained professional organizers and community members formed community-based organizations such as FIGHT ON in Rochester, New York, and the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago to empower people at the grassroots level to confront larger, more powerful forces negatively affecting their lives. IAF training was directed toward residents who had a geographic focus, groups of tenants who had formed communities of common interests, and civil rights activists representing communities of ascribed characteristics.

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