Written by Rick Cohen
[To read the entire article, visit the website]Those of us who cut our teeth in the community development movement, working for community action agencies in the War on Poverty or working for community development corporations—including those that were created or boosted through the Special Impact Program of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and Title VII of the Community Services Act of 1974—know a fundamental truth about nonprofit community development corporations. For all of the arm’s length advocacy on behalf of poor people done by professional policy advocates who never seem to come within yards of the people they purport to represent, Community Development Corporations and the CDC movement in general have been assiduous advocates with and on behalf of poor people in inner cities and in rural communities.
The work of the best CDCs is reflective of the theory of “non-reformist reform.” CDCs get things done, but in the course of doing so, they achieve more than outputs of housing and services. They create a different dynamic of community development in poor neighborhoods. In this dynamic residents see that they can get things done for themselves at the same time as they more generally advocate for vital resources and supports from local, state, and federal governmental authorities for all communities.
Not all CDCs are there on the simultaneous achievement of concrete improvements in poor people’s lives and advocacy for systemic changes in public policy toward the inner city and rural poor. But some truly epitomize the best of the field by pushing for social change while implementing creative on-the-ground programming. This is what makes community development a distinctive segment of the nonprofit sector, functioning,at the intersection of advocacy and progress.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/24665-heroes-heroines-and-others-in-nonprofit-community-development.html
Stephanie Doty
Discouraging NP Dysfunction
August 14, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
