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Faculty, students, and staff at Bucknell, Bloomsburg, and other institutions in Central Pennsylvania have started a community action research group focused on our version of Urban Institute’s Community Platform. As part of our group work we recognize that we need to work our way through the community studies literature and to that end we want to post reading summaries in some accessible place. For now this blog is it.

What follows is a short note I included in an email to Bucknell colleague Jordi Comas about Xavier de Sousa Briggs’ book DEMOCRACY AS PROBLEM SOLVING. Jordi and I plan to work ourselves through several books including WHY THE GARDEN CLUB COULD NOT SAVE YOUNGSTOWN, so this note says a bit about the two books. The Briggs book was recommended by Tom Pollak, creator of the Community Platform system at Urban Institute. Tom’s primary value is to build leadership and civic capacity at the local level. Although the Community Platform is a wonderful technical tool, his vision is that it can be a means of building collaboration and civic capacity. That certainly is our orientation here in Central PA.

So here are my short comments on Briggs (based on reading 2/3 of the book)

I’m about 2/3 throug Briggs. I returned my copy to the library so you can get it there. It’s very similar in theme and focus to Youngstown except that it has multiple case studies and it’s international. It would be very interesting to compare the perspectives on civic capacity in the two books. The Youngstown book is much more built around the notion that communities have interorganizational networks of nonprofits that are more or less dense, active, and inclined to come to the fore to deal with civic betterment. Briggs picks some cases (most notably Pittsburgh) that are famous for interorganizational connectedness and civic mobilization and while he thinks they are good examples of civic mobilization he also shows quite convincingly that in Pittsburgh the reputation is a myth to a significant extent.

I was pushed to look at Briggs by Tom Pollak who wants to believe that the Community Platform is an instrument fostering the development of civic capacity. Pollak views this as social action and not as a mechanical product of his tool, the community portal or platform. Briggs thinks civic capacity is real and important but he thinks also that it is chaotic and that social science theories like political pluralism imagine a level of order and directional social progress that is a fantasy. The chaos element appeals to me but it also leaves me puzzled about what to DO. The YOUNGSTOWN book is much more programmatic about what to do—build and nurture the background interorganizational network. That’s what I’m trying to do via the platform and the notion that there’s variability in network density and network capacity between communities suggests that some sort of “health practices” approach might help. Counter to this is Putnam’s notion that civic capacity is historical and deeply rooted in local traditions so it is not easily altered.