Librarian

From A PLACE AT THE TABLE (by Kathleen de la Peña McCook, ALA, 2000.

Chapter 1. “The Many Dimensions of Community.”

“Libraries build community,” (1) the theme of millennium president of the American Library Association, Sarah Long (1999-2000), reverberates for those who provide the public with library services. This theme has great inclusiveness and appeals to the commitment of the profession to information equity and lifelong learning. (2) These ideals are included in the mission and value statements of libraries throughout the United States.

Yet committed as the profession is to this concept, the substantial literature about community building seldom mentions libraries. It is as if librarians operate in a parallel universe apart from community development groups, planners, or government agencies. The purpose of this paper is to describe recent discussion on community to provide librarians who believe that we are fundamental to community building, with the context needed to take the next step—the step that places librarians and library service as essential to community.

Definitions of Community, its Perceived Decline, Civil Society

If this exploration of how librarians can build community is to provide workable suggestions, there must first be an understanding of the term, ”community.” In libraries we speak of community quite broadly to indicate all whom we are mandated to serve. Where once this meant fairly precise taxing districts, libraries have, through interlocal agreements, reciprocal borrowing, interlibrary loan and cyber access extended our service bases. Thus “building community” might mean extension to people beyond governmental jurisdictions to librarians, but more often in the broader literature, seems to mean the geographic boundaries of taxed service or smaller neighborhood areas.

In the United States today there is a great deal of discussion about the loss of a traditional sense of place which is what most people conceptualize as “community.” Cities have never been monolithic communities but rather many individual neighborhoods under a single government. As suburbs grew and many became self-governing entities each sought to establish itself as a special place endowed with a set of characteristics that are manifested by a sense of a community of people that know each other and work together. But as these suburbs flowed together with no real boundaries but lines on maps, any sense of the suburbs as places with unique characteristics or sense of place has faded. (3) Small towns, perhaps the quintessential community in the golden patina of nostalgic visions, struggle with economic distress as do the rural areas that sustain them. (4) Additionally, it is important to recognize that rural communities have economies based on a variety of activities including agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, so few generalizations hold. (5)

In The Spirit of Community, his exposition of the communitarian philosophy, Amitai Etzioni observes that there are also nongeographic communities made of people who work together or share other social bonds. (6) He has clarified this expansive definition to state that communities are groups of people who share affective bonds and cultures with a commitment to shared norms, values and meanings.(7) Communities, then, may be shared territory, shared values, or even a sense of shared destiny.

Yet the ideal of community—be it geographic or social—has been seen by many as eroding in the face of declining civic engagement. This erosion has received broad attention in response to the interview of Robert D. Putnam in the Journal of Democracy, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,”8 and to his 1995 lecture, “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America.” (9) Putnam’s contention is that civic engagement has declined as measured by citizen’s attending political meetings, serving on local organization’s committees or working for political parties. Membership and volunteering for civic organizations such as parent-teacher associations, women’s clubs, the League of Women Voters, the Red Cross, Girl and Boy Scouts has fallen far below levels of the previous generation. At the same time mass-membership organizations such as the American Association of Retired Persons or the Sierra Club have grown, though membership involvement is simply by writing a check rather than the creation of an ongoing social bond among members.

What obstacles to community building exist in face of this decline in social capital? People feel they are too busy, suburbanization erodes a sense of connection, frequent moves make it difficult to feel a part of the neighborhood where one lives. The rise of chain stores, the decline of family businesses, and television as a replacement for group meetings have all contributed to a weakening of the sense of community. This disconnectedness is exacerbated by the growth of gated affluent communities that look within, rather than without and disengage increasingly greater numbers of the professional classes from general civic involvement. (10) Gated communities share the definition of community as territory and are more inclined to be Homeowner Associations (HOA) rather than civic-based. “Residents view HOAs as a means of protecting their private property and guarding against intrusions ….rooted in private property rights and ownership…not extending to the public shared community.” (11)

These concerns have initiated an expanded debate and call for new forms of civil society—“a rational response to social change—not a rebellion against the modern world but a new attempt to deal with modernity’s discontents and dislocations…. an attempt to build the social, communal, ethnic, and neighborhood associations that suit these times.” (12) Michael Walzer sees civil society as “the name of the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space. (13) In the civil society people will be connected to each other and will feel responsible for each other. (14)

The focus on community in the nineties—from the establishment of the communitarian movement in 1991, through the observations of Putnam on the decline of social capital to the renewed call for a civil society—demonstrates that community is a concern that has deeply engaged sociologists, political scientists and philosophers at the level of values and beliefs generating wide debate in popular journals and scholarly treatises.

Thus when we, as librarians, state that the libraries where we work “build community,” we must realize that we are standing for a commitment to an evolving sense of communities and to build these communities we must be fully informed about this evolution.

Initiatives to Build Community

Discussion of community is daunting because of the broad expansiveness of the term. As demonstrated above, there is concern that the spirit of community is diminishing even in affluent neighborhoods and small towns. To some degree the focus on community in this nation over the last several decades has been on distressed communities in need of basic housing, services, and economic development. A brief summary of recent community building initiatives helps to clarify this discussion.

Non-profit Community Development Corporations (CDCs) promote stability in local communities through community revitalization. They are organizations that usually focus on a specific geographical area. Activities have centered on building houses, brokering financing, and revitalizing neighborhoods as multi-purpose, community controlled corporations.(15 )A recent study by Alan C. Twelvetrees provides a brief history of the evolution of CDCs from Poverty Programs in the sixties to local organizations striving to revitalize neighborhoods. In some cases extant organizations such as Chicago’s Woodlawn Organization or Oakland’s Spanish-Speaking Unity Council became development organizations; in others external support such as the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (set up in Brooklyn by Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits) provided impetus.(16)

Today CDCs have taken a strong role in the social building of communities. Nationally about 2,000 CDCs are active and their agendas include delivery of social services, economic development, community and resident organizing and advocacy. But it is difficult to characterize CDCs in general as each is configured to meet the needs of particular communities. A recent study identifies general characteristics shared by most CDCs as they seek to build the social infrastructure. Areas of focus include leadership, security, employment, education, family skills and supports, health, public services and community cohesion.( 17) A number of resource agencies, usually foundation funded, have been established to provide support or funding for CDCs including the Local Initiative Support Corporation which has as its purpose building neighborhoods with a true sense of community.(18) Another is the Center for Community Change which increases the capacity of community-based organizations, connects people to resources, and provides on-site assistance to grassroots groups.(19)

The U.S. federal government has also taken action to build community through a joint initiative of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In 1994 President Bill Clinton designated 105 distressed communities as Empowerment Zones (EZs) and Enterprise Communities (ECs). In his National Urban Policy Report, then HUD Secretary, Henry G. Cisneros, stated that the Community Empowerment agenda would link families to work, leverage private investment, be locally driven, and affirm traditional values such as hard work, family and self-reliance. This urban policy “is about building communities that work for people and America.”20 The companion policies for the rural United States are described in the mission statement of the USDA Office of Rural Development as creating self-sufficiency and long-term economic development to empower people and communities to work together to create jobs and opportunities.21

The variety of community building efforts supported by the EZs and ECs are identified in What Works!22 a joint HUD/USDA publication outlining examples of how community-based partnerships in E Zs and ECs have developed local solutions to problems. The programs are overseen by the Community Empowerment Board chaired by Vice-President Al Gore and comprised of heads of more than 20 Cabinet Agencies and Executive Offices intended to help cut through bureaucratic procedures on behalf of the EZ/EC communities. A mid-point analysis of these includes discussion of the difficulty in maintaining grassroots involvement once the bureaucratic structures retake control.23

The reports and studies that examine the activities of CDCs and Clinton’s empowerment agenda fuel the broad focus on community building which fills the journals and conference programs of the nineties. These real world examples of community building as framed by general philosophical discussions begin to show us that the goal of libraries building community is appropriate and timely. However, library efforts have not been connected in ways that appear in the broad literature seeking to define community or in the discussions of CDCs, EZs and ECs.

Community Building

Community building is difficult to define because, while the concept is long-standing, it has changed and evolved with an increasing broad-based national focus during the nineties. A project to broaden the understanding of community building funded by the Annie E.Casey Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development resulted in the monograph, Community Building Coming of Age.24 This is a succinct review of the community building literature that distills thematic approaches and differentiates the “new” community building of the nineties from the narrower neighborhood focus of the past. Six themes about community building are identified:
• Focused around specific improvement initiatives in a manner that reinforces values and builds social and human capital.
• Community-driven with broad resident involvement.
• Comprehensive, strategic and entrepreneurial.
• Asset-based.
• Tailored to neighborhood scale and conditions.
• Collaboratively linked to the broader society to strengthen community institutions and enhance outside opportunities for residents. Consciously changing institutional barriers and racism.2

These six community building themes are central to success in the current milieu of social policy. According to the authors of Community Building Comes of Age:
the feature that most starkly contrasts community building with approaches to poverty alleviation that have been typical in America over the past half-century is that its primary aim is not simply giving more money, services, or other material benefits to the poor. While most of its advocates recognize a continuing need for considerable assistance (public and private), community building’s central theme is to obliterate feelings of dependency and to replace them with attitudes of self-reliance self-confidence, and responsibility.26

Of course by extension these themes apply to all communities affluent or poor. Although the majority of the community building literature focuses on distressed communities, it is important to gain a working knowledge of how these discussions might be applied to all community situations. When more affluent communities are involved in community building there is an increasing tendency for these activities to be characterized as civic involvement or civic renewal.

An effective catalyst for these concerns has been the Alliance for National Renewal; a coalition of over 200 national and local organizations dedicated to the principles of community renewal. Its motto is “Unleashing the Power of Communities.” The vision of the Alliance is for a renewed nation of communities that work for everyone.27 The publications of the Alliance provide a map for the renewal of community; notably The Community Visioning and Strategic Handbook.28 The Alliance is a National Civic League Program, and the League inscribes under its logo, “A Century of Community Building.” The Alliance and the League have established a Community Assistance Team, which works with communities to provide technical assistance in various aspects of community building including the development of planning and visioning.

Community visions should reflect a community’s common values. Development of a community vision is the process of bringing together all sectors of a community to identify problems, evaluate changing conditions, and build collective approaches to improve the quality of life in a community. Shared problem solving and planning for the future empowers the community’s collective self-esteem and pride and causes citizens to be invested stakeholders in their community’s future.29

With technical assistance from the Alliance’s Community Assistance Team many communities have developed visioning statements as well as full-blown strategic plans. These include plans by Fargo-Moorhead (Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota); St. Louis, Missouri; Blue Springs, Missouri; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Linn County, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Indianapolis, Indiana. Many of these plans are available on the worldwide web for review.

Each plan was formulated by a calling together of interested community participants—some stakeholders by position or occupation (business owners, social service providers), as well as engaged citizens. Focus groups, task forces and committees worked on different aspects of planning and visioning. Implementation might be through a CDC, a newly formed collaborative supported with a combination of local and foundation funds, or an ongoing core of citizens with shared vision. Some communities had external funding to produce their plan or vision, some worked as volunteers. Emerging from a review of many plans comes an understanding that these efforts provide a basis for community building as much through the process of discussion as through the achievement of a final product.

Community building, then, can be a focused effort to create a plan or vision for a broad community. It can be a process that is required to apply EZ/EC funds and implicit is the internalization of community building tenets. But community building can also take place within the context of life-long learning and civic renewal.

Civic Renewal as Community Building

Parallel to the community building initiatives and growing from observations on the decline in civic engagement have been efforts to reinvigorate citizens of the United States with a sense of civic commitment—a new citizenship. This citizenship is the capacity developed by real-world public work that creates a stake and standing in society through contribution.

The “New Citizenship Project,” at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs developed a White Paper on “The New Citizenship” in 1993. It called for a partnership between citizens and government based on active citizenship as the foundation of politics, conceived as public problem-solving. This will be an enlarged citizen perspective in which the individual’s sphere of concern becomes transnational.30

In December 1994 a “Civic Declaration: A Call for a New Citizenship” was made calling for citizens to reclaim responsibility for and power over the nation’s public affairs. It was set forth from “the vantage point of a ‘third sector’—that vibrant array of voluntary associations, religious congregations, schools and colleges, the free press, professional groups, and community organizations that mediate between government and the market and that span the space between private life and mega-institutions.”31 The Declaration identified a new generation of innovative leadership—citizen politicians—interested in engaging citizens more actively in government and public policy. There is a recognition that all communities hold immense civic potentials.

Ideas from the Civic Declaration and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship White Paper were discussed at Camp David prior to President Clinton’s 1995 “State of the Union Address” to help the President think through civility and citizenship, the role of government in America and the future of the American state in the information age.

These concepts had been further clarified through the founding of the Alliance for National Renewal (program of the National Urban League) and the American Civic Forum. These groups have fostered the Civil Practices Network (CPN) as a learning collaborative for civic renewal.32 The CPN is committed to revitalizing democracy to tackle the complex problems of the 21st century. Among over fifty organizations affiliated with the CPN are the Center for Civic Networking, the Center for the Study of Community, the Communitarian Network, the Institute for the Study of Civic Values, Libraries for the Future, National Civic League, Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and Study Circles Resource Center. Activities of the organizations in this collaborative include working to develop civic skills at every level, empowering families, and developing community capacity for problem solving. Through the CPN the work of these organizations is shared and dialogue encouraged.

An especially compelling worldview on civic renewal may be found in the publications of the Center for Living Democracy. The mission of the Center is to inspire and prepare people to make democracy a rewarding, practical everyday approach to solving society’s problems.33 The vision of the Center accommodates the role of libraries to build community quite well.

2000 and Beyond

Community, community building, civic renewal and the living democracy all characterize a dense philosophical and social justice theme to the last decade of the millennium in contract to the far more visible coverage of the booming economy. Ironically, for the most part, libraries and librarians in the United States have been drawn away from these philosophical and sociological discussions as they have grappled with the concurrent surge of technological change. During the same period that a call for Civic Renewal resounded librarians were assimilating the application of new technologies made possible by widespread adoption of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Thus it is highly appropriate that the American Library Association move into 2000 with a reassessment of what it means that libraries build community. That we have done this there is no doubt; that others know we have done this and include us in their deliberations is far less certain.

Librarians have not been at the table during the national discussions about community building and the new citizenship. Librarians have not been prominent in the grants for EZs and Ecs or CDC planning. There has been little mention of libraries in visioning documents or plans by new urbanist designers. Libraries, like schools, are generally viewed as community services that are passive participants rather than the proactive participants in broad visioning initiatives. Exceptions exist, but they have not been so visible as to move the work of librarians to a central role as documented in the national discussion of community building.

NOTES
1. Sarah Ann Long, “Building Communities is Our Business,” American Libraries 30 (August 1999): 39.

2. Kathleen de la Peña McCook, “Using Ockham’s Razor: Cutting to the Center. Proposal for the Professional Concerns Committee of the Congress on Professional Education.” American Library Association, March 1, 1999. Accessed January 3, 2000. Available .

3. Peter Newman, “Greening the City,” in Eco-City Dimensions edited by Mark Roseland (Gabriola Island, BC, 1997), p. 15.

4. Richard V.Francavilgia, Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1996).

5. Norman Walzer and Steven Deller, “Rural Issues and Trends: The Role of Strategic Visioning Programs, in Community Strategic Visioning Programs edited by Norman Walzer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 5-6.

6. Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community (New York, Crown Publishers, 1993), pp. 121-122.

7. Amitai Etzioni, “The Attack on Community,” Society 32 (July/August 1995): 12-17.

8. Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6
(1995): 65-78.

9. Robert D. Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,”
P.S. Political Science and Politics 28 (1995): 664-683.

10. Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997).

11. Blakely and Snyder, p.35.

12. E.J.Dionne Jr. “Introduction: Why Civil Society? Why Now?” in his Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), pp. 7-8.

13. Michael Walzer, “The Idea of Civil Society: A Path to Social Reconstruction,” supra, pp. 123-124.

14. Walzer, p.143.

15. Ford Foundation, Seizing Opportunities: The Role of CDCs in Urban Economic Development (New York: Ford Foundation, 1998).

16. Alan C.Twelvetrees, Organizing for Community Development 2nd ed. (Aldershot, Hants, England: Avebury, 1996), p.7.

17. Mindy Leiterman and Joseph Stillman, Building Community (New York: Local Initiatives Support Corporation, 1993).

18. Local Initiatives Support Corporation, home page. Accessed November 8, 1999. Available .

19. Center for Community Change, home page. Accessed November 8, 1999. Available .

20. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research Empowerment: A New Covenant with America’s Communities (Washington, D.C.: U.S. HUD, 1995).

21. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Strategic Plan of the USDA, September 1997, section 8-5. Accessed November 8, 1999. Available .

22. What Works! In the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities v.2 (Washington,D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1997).

23. “EZ/ECs” The Neighborhood Works 20 (January. February 1997), entire issue.

24. G. Thomas Kingsley, Joseph B. McNeely, James O.Gibson, Community Building Comes of Age, (Washington, D.C.: The Development Training Institute, Inc. The Urban Institute, 1997). Accessed November 10, 1999. Available .

25. G. Thomas Kingsley.

26. Ibid.

27. Alliance for National Renewal. Accessed November 11, 1999. Available .

28. Derek Okubo, The Community Visioning and Strategic Handbook, 2nd ed. Denver (National Civic League Press, Alliance for National Renewal, 1997).

29. Derek Okubo. “Community Vision and Pride,” in Community Building. Accessed November 11, 1999. Available .

30. Harry Boyte, Benjamin Barber, Dorothy Cotton, Hal Saunders, Suzanne Morse, “The New Citizenship: White Paper, A Partnership Between Citizens and Government,” Accessed November 10, 1999. Available .

31. “Civic Declaration: Call for a New Citizenship.” Accessed November 9,1999. Available .

32. Civic Practice Network, home page. Accessed November 8, 1999. Available .

33. Doing Democracy: The Quarterly Newsletter of the Center for the Living Democracy 6 (Fall 1999).