Community Involvement

Dimensions of Community Involvement

Community involvement can take on many forms, varying across multiple dimensions; the anchors of a subset of such dimensions are described in this entry.

Involvement can be formal or informal, varying in degree of structure and commitment. As two examples from the formal end of the spectrum, an elected official holds set responsibilities within an organization for a specified period of time, and a volunteer at a nonprofit agency perhaps commits to answering a crisis hotline for 3 hours on the same night of each week. Informal involvement, on the other hand, is less structured and likely involves no explicit commitment to continue involvement. A citizen might call the authorities to report a suspicious person lurking near an elementary school; a family might regularly introduce newcomers on the block to the long-time residents.

Involvement also varies in terms of duration. It can be sustained (e.g., a long-term member of the school board), intermittent (e.g., a person who participates in neighborhood beautification projects every few years), or one-shot (e.g., a person who attends a community parade once during his or her residency).

Although community involvement is generally a social pursuit in as much as it contributes to the social fabric of broader collectives, it nevertheless varies in the extent to which the actions themselves are social. Others need not necessarily be involved in order for an action to qualify as community involvement. Examples of potentially solo actions that could nevertheless constitute community involvement include picking up a piece of litter in the park, writing a letter to the newspaper editor, maintaining a Web site for a hobbyist group, and reading a poster announcing a lost pet. If others are involved, they may be total strangers (e.g., marchers at a public protest), familiar others (e.g., individuals attending a Neighborhood Watch meeting or regular participants in an online community of cancer survivors), or even close friends (e.g., a small group of families who take turns preparing weekday meals for the other families).

Factors That Motivate Community Involvement

A complex constellation of factors compel individuals to become involved in their communities. These factors range from the purely situational (e.g., welcoming a stranger into one's home after a devastating natural disaster hits the community) to the purely psychological (e.g., assuaging feelings of loneliness by volunteering one's time at an agency). Factors motivating involvement fall roughly into three categories: other-focused, self-focused, and mandated.

Individuals motivated by other-focused interests generally seek to improve the lives of other people, ranging from a specific person (e.g., a child in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program) to society at large (e.g., as in the case of an environmental activist seeking to improve the world for her or his descendants). In contrast, individuals motivated by self-focused interests seek to improve or express some aspects of one's own life. A partial list of such self-focused motivations include a desire to fulfill value-based goals (e.g., religious, political, humanitarian), to fulfill a need to belong to a social group, to increase one's self-esteem, to promote one's own career, to gain skills or knowledge, to nurture gen-erativity, and to expand one's social network.

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