The dissertation entitled, Team work to make the dream work: The New Communities' Program, interorganizational networks, and community economic development in two Chicago neighborhoods , discusses how local community-based groups within two impoverished neighborhoods responded to the large-scale public-private redevelopment initiative, the Local Initiative Support Corporation/Chicago's (LISC/Chicago) New Communities' Program (NCP). Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 32 interviews conducted with key organizational informants from both neighborhoods, the city, and from the national community development intermediary LISC, and content analysis of development reports, newspaper articles, and press releases, this project compares two neighborhood environments - Greater Englewood, an historically poor African-American community on the South East side of Chicago, and Little Village, a working poor predominantly Mexican-immigrant and undocumented community on the Near South West side. Both neighborhoods are member communities of the NCP.
As the literatures on organizations and community development highlight, the involvement of local and national growth elites in local (re)development plans could, on the one hand, increase residents' and community organizations' access to social capital. This occurs via increased relationships of trust across sectors, which can lead to increased resources (money, technical expertise, diffusion of ideas, ties to powerful economic and political actors). On the other hand, these relationships could also lead to organizational co-optation, decreased gains for low-income residents, and a loss of critical civic space. These adverse effects can be particularly high within areas of low social, economic, and political power. With few exceptions, much of the literature on community (re)development focuses on increasing social capital within poor communities via relationships of trust. These studies often advocate for increased interorganizational networks of trust between local nonprofits and powerful external actors. Yet, this dissertation highlights that if we instead view interorganizational relationships as networks of opportunity, rather than networks of trust, we can better understand how community organizations in low-income areas are able to strategically work together despite power differentials and mistrust.
Networks of opportunity allow for collaborations between organizations that generally do not trust each other. This approach to networking and collaboration can ensure heterogeneous redevelopment plans and can also operate to mitigate power differentials between residents, local community groups, and redevelopment power holders (city officials, for-profit real estate developers, philanthropy). At the same time, rather than blindly engaging in trust relationships that can replicate power inequities, networks of opportunity (that acknowledge and support mistrust and skepticism) evolve based on common goals, despite organizational differences. Although trust can be an important aspect of coalition building, this dissertation highlights that not all organizational actors within a poor community are committed to the same goals, nor do they have access to the same kinds of economic and political capital or the same levels of power. Furthermore, in considering the community redevelopment organizational environment that the NCP operated in, my findings show that trust relationships can operate to minimize dissent, and work to socialize members into a homogenous organizational culture. Although the NCP via LISC/Chicago aimed to deliberately address the historical exclusion of poor residents from large-scale redevelopment initiatives, LISC/Chicago's stance as a community development intermediary prevented them from engaging in, or supporting, advocacy work that could lead to real policy changes. Instead, in order to ensure that they remained friendly with a variety of powerful institutional, political, and economic actors, LISC/Chicago worked to increase relationships of trust between themselves, city officials, and NCP affiliated nonprofit lead agencies within the target communities. After the implementation of the NCP, the local lead agencies (re)framed their missions around less adversarial actions to ensure that they received full benefits from LISC/Chicago and other external funders. The relationships between the lead agencies and LISC/Chicago resulted in increased organizational social capital as it relates to organizational trust, and access to funds, resources, and political clout. Rather than building social capital for low-income residents, these networks tend to focus more on building organizational capital.
Drawing from organizations and community development theories, I found that as the lead agencies within Chicago became aligned with LISC/Chicago via the NCP and moved towards more non-confrontational programming, they followed the money to focus primarily on providing a broad set of social services to a wider audience within their respective communities. Contrary to the literature on community development, however, I argue that the presence of these professionalized lead agencies with ties to political and economic power holders actually did not lead to a silencing of community voice or a narrowing of civic activity within Chicago. Rather, grassroots organizations with no ties to the NCP engaged in networks of opportunity and worked with residents and other local, national, and citywide organizations to improve civic literacy, and engage in a process of what I term civic-making - where community organizations come to understand the language of representation and the language of power holders, and then use that knowledge to strategically plan their actions and both educate and involve community members in civil society. The main crux of civic-making is both the education and inclusion of residents in a variety of community actions (advocacy, development, voting). This form of resident involvement allows for tangible benefits to low-income residents and works to ensure that local politicians, governmental agencies, developers, and non-profits are held accountable to community members. Civic-making combined with networks of opportunity provide us with a framework for deepening our understanding of the ways that local community groups navigate complex interorganizational networks, urban (re)development projects, and socially unjust funding structures.
By tracing how more adversarial community organizations approach coalition building, I uncovered that although there was a high level of mistrust between the lead agencies, the intermediary, and non-NCP affiliated grassroots groups, these organizations still collaborated, and shared information, resources, and ideas. These collaborative relationships, or networks of opportunity, provided greater benefits to both community organizations and local residents. Rather than working towards building trust, non-NCP grassroots groups in these networks used their skepticism of the NCP, the lead agencies, local politicians, and other external organizations as a tool towards ensuring a more careful evaluation of what's doable and of the information that is shared, and with a more critical eye towards project outcomes. This approach to networking, while potentially time-consuming and difficult, is particularly useful in networks that contain unequal power relations. Furthermore, because organizational members are open to publicly questioning the potential consequences to these projects, networks of opportunity and civic-making can more readily allow for heterogeneous approaches to community development, and also ensure that powerful community-developers, intermediaries, and politicians are not able to steer growth via consensus.
