Neighborhood Associations

Neighborhood associations are grassroots, voluntary, nonprofit organizations composed of people from a geographic area who work collectively and in a volunteer capacity to solve problems and pursue common goals. While this sort of organization is often called a neighborhood association, it also can be called a neighborhood council, community council, neighborhood civic association, or block association. This form of grassroots civic engagement can be traced back to the early town hall meetings in New England. In more recent times, formalized neighborhood associations emerged in the 1970s in some cities in response to fiscal constraints that led to coproduction of government services. Coproduction means that consumers of services, in this case residents, provide a public service jointly with the public agency, with the goals of reducing ...