Philanthropy's Civic Role in Community Change

Abstract

Comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) require a large number of institutional actors to work together on behalf of a neighborhood. The range of civic, social, economic, and physical development outcomes that CCIs seek cannot be achieved without collaboration and partnership. The CCIs of the 1990s taught us that although high-quality programmatic interventions are necessary for positive community change, attending to the nonprogrammatic dimensions of community change-especially individual and institutional capacities, roles, and relationships-is also an essential part of the process. In fact, weak implementation capacity and ineffective management have been found to undermine many otherwise promising initiatives whose community-level activities may have been well-theorized, welldesigned, and well-planned (Brown & Fiester, 2007; Kubisch et al., 2002; Potapchuk & Kopell, 2005). As the field has matured, it has become clear that creating effective working relationships among neighborhood organizations and then be

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