Building Community Capacity

by Avis Vidal, Prudence Brown, Sudhir Venkatesh

This book focuses on a gap in current social work practice community change. Much work in this area of macro practice, particularly around "grassroots" community organizing, has a somewhat dated feel to it, is highly ideological in orientation, or suffers from superficiality, particularly in the area of theory and practical application. Set against the context of an often narrowly constructed "clinical" emphasis on practice education, coupled with social work’s own current rendering of "scientific management," community practice often takes second or third billing in many professional curricula despite its deep roots in the overall field of social welfare.

Drawing on extensive case study data from three significant community-building initiatives, program data from numerous other community capacity-building efforts, key informant interviews, and an excellent literature review, Chaskin and his colleagues draw implications for crafting community change strategies as well as for creating and sustaining the organizational infrastructure necessary to support them. The authors bring to bear the perspectives of a variety of professional disciplines including sociology, urban planning, psychology, and social work.

Building Community Capacity takes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to a subject of wide and current the role of neighborhood and community structures in the delivery of human services or, as the authors put it, "a place where programs and problems can be fitted together." Social work scholars and students of community practice seeking new conceptual frameworks and insights from research to inform novel community interventions will find much of value in Building Community Capacity.

280 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001

About the author

Avis Vidal is a Professor of Urban Studies & Planning and Wayne State University. She specializes in community development.

Reviews

[Lindsay]

This book develops a basic theoretical "framework" for how community development occurs in the first chapter. The following chapters elaborate on each aspect of the developed framework with detailed real-life examples and suggestions. The entire book is summed up in the 1st 6 pages of the final chapter. Unless you need the detailed examples, you could read those 6 pages instead of buying the book.

As a reference book for community developers I would cautiously recommend this book (I say cautiously because I really have no idea what community developers would need in a book). As a sociological text I would not recommend this book. The framework that the authors developed does not really reference other authoritative sociological theories and the framework is much too complicated to be useful.

[Alvian]

To know more bout how community to be built and upgrading people capacities.