The American Communities Movement

Across the United States various movements such as Healthy Communities, Sustainable Communities, Community Building, Civic Democracy, Livable Communities, Safe Communities, and Smart Growth are all working to improve the quality of life in communities.

For the past eighteen months, the National Civic League and the Coalition for Healthier Cities and Communities have been conducting a project, supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to evaluate the potential for convergence by these community movements into a "Communities Movement." While we found that it is too early to speak of such a Movement, these individual movements share a set of underlying values, tools, and goals.

First, NCL and CHCC found that, while community-based movements are founded in differing professional disciplines and fields of study, they all have one common thematic element - that successful community-based projects and initiatives rely upon the existence of a strong civic infrastructure within communities.

Correlatively, many of these movements have begun to recognize the value indicators hold as a means to strengthen community civic infrastructure. Community-based, community-owned indicators can be an important means of empowering citizens through providing them with information about conditions that affect their lives. Moreover, the process of designing community-based indicators can also increase citizen participation in the development of public policy.

As Drew O'Connor, lead NCL staff for the project argues, "While there is no "Communities Movement" as of yet, there is no question that all of these movements and community-based programs have gravitated towards the development of indicators to track their progress, engage citizens and impact public policy. As a tool, indicator development has the potential to cut across the many community-based movements and projects."

Interestingly, community organizations and coalitions have arrived at indicators from a number of different fields such as sustainability, health and healthy communities, arts and culture, civic participation and social capital, planning councils, and chambers of commerce.

Despite the increasing use of indicators as a convening, measurement and public policy tool, there has not yet been developed a mechanism at the national level to bring the many groups doing indicator work together to share best practices. In his research of indicator work across the country, Dr. Marc Mirngoff of the Fordham University Institute for Innovation and Social Policy estimates that there are over 150 such community-based indicator projects and organizations across the United States.

O'Connor concludes, "Creating a formalized community indicators integration venue would enable the sharing of resources and best practices, and the identification of opportunities for shared action and practical connecting points between the various groups. This would augment the potential for local, state and national community indicator initiatives to implement community transformation projects."

Yet at the same time, O'Connor cautions, indicator work ultimately must be conducted at the community level. As such, capacity building organizations, such as the National Civic League, should continue to provide assistance to U.S. communities, regions, and neighborhoods to help them create their own community-based indicators.

A second major finding of the Kellogg-supported project was that in a few communities throughout the U.S. a new type of organization has emerged, capable of effectively facilitating community transformation in line with the shared values of the Communities Movements.

These organizations have the capacity to create neutral spaces for public deliberation, provide detailed information on community issues, communicate that information to the general public, lead planning activities, and amplify citizen voices at the public policy level. These capacities, in turn, facilitate successful, citizen-based, improvements in the quality of life of their communities.

These organizations are informed by the values and tools of the community movements such as the deliberative practices of civic democracy, indicator development from the sustainability movement, equity from community builders, and the visioning and convening tools of the healthy community movement.

Jacksonville Community Council Incorporated (JCCI) provides perhaps the best illustration of this type of organization. Over the years, JCCI has developed the capacity to convene citizens across sectors, inform them with relevant indicators and data, and engage them in studying critical community issues and developing action plans to improve the overall quality of life in Jacksonville.

Other organizations such as the Boulder (Colorado) County Civic Forum, Innovation Partnerships of Portland, Oregon, and Vision 2020 of Greater Lafayette, Indiana have separately and organically developed similar sets of capacities and roles in varying degrees with individual nuances.

At the same time, NCL and CHCC found that in many other communities, organizations that desire to facilitate community transformation are beginning to emerge, but have yet to develop all of the sophisticated organizational capacities that mature organizations like those in Jacksonville, Boulder, and Portland possess.

O'Connor once again concludes that these findings help point the way to organizations seeking to facilitate community change, whether they are capacity building organizations or foundations supporting community transformation. He challenges those already working in the various community movements, "Organizations are emerging across the country that have the potential and desire to transform their communities. We all need to work with these groups to help them develop the capacity to do so."

The NCL/CHCC project was designed as a series of five dialogues in locations around the country, accompanied by a survey of project participants. Daylong dialogues were held in Des Moines, Iowa; White River Junction, Vermont; Jacksonville, Florida; and Salt Lake City, Utah.

Dialogue participants examined the degree to which they shared core values and principles, whether the participants might work together in the future, and then discussed the potential they saw for developing a communities movement. NCL and CHCC then convened a Washington, DC dialogue of leaders of national movements to discuss the findings from the previous dialogues and to assess future directions.

For more information about the Communities Movement project, please see the National Civic Review, 90:4 - Winter 2001, "The American Communities Movement" or visit http://www.ncl.org/publications/ncr/index.html.