Summary
Contents
Subject index
The Handbook of Community Practice is the first volume in this field, encompassing community development, organizing, planning, and social change, and the first community practice text that provides in-depth treatment of globalization—including its impact on communities in the United States and in international development work. The Handbook is grounded in participatory and empowerment practice including social change, social and economic development, feminist practice, community-collaboratives, and engagement in diverse communities. It utilizes the social development perspective and employs analyses of persistent poverty, policy practice, and community research approaches as well as providing strategies for advocacy and social and legislative action.
History, Context, and Emerging Issues for Community Practice
History, Context, and Emerging Issues for Community Practice
History provides a collective memory, historical shoulders to stand on, and roots for contemporary practice. Historical knowledge also puts practice into comparative perspective, as the similarities and differences of efforts in prior eras force comparison with contemporary practice. We dismiss the past—for its provincialism, naïveté, or worse—at our own peril. It isn't simply, as Santayana warned, that those who fail to heed the past are condemned to repeat it. There is no present without the past. Because we in community organization are overwhelmed by the demands of the present, we think we have little time for history, that reviewing and understanding the past is a luxury. But history matters.
Certainly, issues of human agency—defining the very nature of a community organization, its goals, methods, daily choices—play a critical role in the life of any community organization effort. But the larger historical context heavily influences which conceptualizations and choices are available or encouraged, as well as which goals and strategies seem salient and likely to succeed. The renowned English social historian E. P. Thompson (1971) referred to history as the discipline of context. Because organizing efforts and writings about organizing are always specific to a particular time and place, a history of community organization situates practice in the context of the varied social sites that generated it. To that end, what follows is a framework for understanding the changes over time in the history of community practice. It is obviously not a definitive history. It offers a model for appreciating major historical roots and currents. As the analysis approaches the present, it reveals continuing historical trends as well as emerging critical issues for community practice.
The Model
This chapter contextualizes the study of contemporary community practice in a cyclical model, which proposes that the transformation of community organization practice occurred less as a linear process and more as a periodic shifting back and forth in response to two dominant influences: (a) changes in the national political economy and (b) developments and pressures in the social work profession. In terms of political economy, throughout the history of community practice, there has been a direct and dialectical relationship between the national political economy and local community efforts.1 In each era since the late 19th century, the national political-economic context—which includes economic power and relations, on the one hand, and the political power to affect or change it, on the other—has given shape to a dominant type of organizing practice. Organizing is always shaped by a myriad of factors, including the work of predecessors, local context, leadership, and resources. Nevertheless, whether it was interorganizational efforts in the charity organization societies in the late 19th century; service delivery, community building, and social action work in settlement houses during the first decades of the 20th century; professional reevaluation and strengthening in the 1920s; social welfare programming and social action efforts in the 1930s; or other trends during other eras, discourse, policies, and programs at the national level substantially determined which types of community practice would develop, survive, attract attention, and succeed (Fisher, 1994).
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