Core Issues in Comprehensive Community-Building Initiatives ...

means, and how to reflect issues of race and power in that.
They had a variety of views regarding the “power” of a
researcher to interpret and, therefore, publicly reflect the
nature of sociopolitical relations in a community.
Researchers also reflected on the business of research and
the persistent problems of race, in particular, in that business.
For example, they talked about researchers of color
who are “brought in” for implementation of research, but
who are less often involved at the point of forming the
methodology or approach. Decision making about research
approach, they suggest, is affected by the lack of diversity
in methodological discussions, and that translates into
less than optimal incorporation of these issues into research
design and contextual understanding. Researchers disagreed
with each other about the importance of race matching
between researchers and the communities they study,
about whether race is a good proxy for “understanding”
in communities of color, and about how they would like
to see research methods change.
Implicitly underscoring the researchers’ point that
local context was essential to capture, site directors focused
on issues of local power politics and how those are both
framed by, and go way beyond, race. In particular, they
talked about internal power struggles at the institutional
and community governing levels, assigning much of the
tension to the sudden empowerment of those who are not
accustomed to handling power. They also reflected on the
particular racial history of neighborhoods, and the importance
of local stories (a hospital notorious for exploitive
research on African Americans, for example) to the character
of the community and the nature of local participation.
Finally, they looked at the power of their own role
and questioned how well they served (or could serve) as
negotiator among all these players.
Technical assistance providers, a category that spans
a variety of professional advisors to community initiatives,
were vocal about what they believed to be the broad
sociopolitical agenda of CCIs and whether initiatives could
be effective in terms of promoting social justice. This particular
group of TA providers were united by a focus on
empowerment and justice, and so tended to speak from
that perspective. Thus, they were most critical of CCI
sponsors and, by implication, CCI designs, for being weak
in the area of social justice (including racial justice and
economic equity), and for overstating the intentions and
objectives of an initiative in this regard. They tended to
attribute misunderstandings between sponsors of initiatives
and practitioners/residents to the different ideologies
among these stakeholders regarding the nature of the
changes they hoped to make. They were, as a group, divided
mostly by the degree of their pessimism or optimism
about the future for most of these communities, in particular
on whether small victories in different locales would
ever add up to significant social change.
Funders concentrated on the relatively new challenge
they’ve set themselves to become more active “partners”
with communities in promoting revitalization. They considered
the obvious problems of these partnerships, i.e., the
power imbalance between a grantmaking foundation controlling
millions of investment dollars and a community of
underfinanced institutions and poor residents. But they also
turned their attention to the obstacles internal to foundations
that work against fundamental changes in grantmaking
approach, especially the makeup of their boards of directors
and the relationship between staff and board. They noted
that this relationship typically discourages frank discussions
of race as either an institutional or social issue, and that, in
turn, discourages true innovation in grantmaking to poor
communities of color. Some key differences among funders
stemmed from the apparently different institutional cultures
of national and community or family foundations. In general,
officers from smaller foundations didn’t feel the same
kind of distance either from board members or the communities
they served as those from national foundations.
The resident volunteers focused on the desire for control,
and contrasted what they mean by control with
“involvement,” the latter being what they believe they’re
offered in most initiatives. They suggested that involvement
of residents is just more of the same kind of initiative
they have seen all along. As a group, they were also critical
of the local effects of grantmaking in poor communities
where an influx of resources can elevate the status of
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Exploring Power and Race