This case study focuses on the way a neighborhood association connects schools to broad change in an urban neighborhood of a large Midwestern city. The first section provides a review of the literature on community involvement in school and neighborhood reform. It reviews the historical origins of the current school-community relationship, the…

In this article, Michael McAfee and Mauricio Torre reflect on the successes and challenges of the Promise Neighborhoods movement as it works toward education equity, and on what it takes to effect large-scale, sustainable change for low-income communities and communities of color. Together they discuss the Chula Vista Promise Neighborhood project…

Free to Grow: Head Start Partnerships to Promote Substance-free Communities (FTG) was a national initiative in which local Head Start (HS) agencies, in partnership with other community organizations, implemented a mix of evidence-based family-strengthening and community-strengthening strategies. The evaluation of FTG used a quasi-experimental…

Healthy and successful cities are built out of blocks and neighborhoods. Cities are too large and varied to be regarded or run as uniform entities. Block associations are proposed to be one of the major tools that are available for stabilizing and maintaining urban neighborhoods in a fashion that is both inexpensive and responsive to the needs of…

Describes community based, voluntary neighborhood revitalization projects in New York and Philadelphia. Discusses the effects of Reagan Administration cutbacks and seeming indifference to such projects which appears to be contradictory to the Republican party platform of 1980 pledging aid for self-helping and cooperative community efforts to…

The Consumer Resources Environteam has developed this idea handbook as part of the Broad Spectrum Environmental Education Program in Brevard County, Florida. Interest had been displayed by local civic groups, fraternal clubs, and private organizations in identifying environmental improvement projects that could be undertaken by individual groups.…

Describes experiences of the Neighborhood Participation Project (Nashville, Tennessee), which studied citizen participation in using research data for neighborhood improvement. Suggests that creating partnerships between social scientists and citizens can improve social science research, enhance research utilization, and help communities to help…

Neighborhood service organizations such as Detroit's Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, Franklin Wright Settlements, and Warren/Conner Development Coalition have developed leadership and mobilized resources for collective action. Neighborhoods served by exceptional organizations contrast sharply with surrounding areas in decline. (SK)

Explores why service-learning students have only rarely been engaged directly as neighborhood organizers, then employs John Dewey's understanding of democracy to analyze one program which has succeeded in making widespread use of college students as front-line organizers. Describes how the complementarity between what students do at their…

This report gives the background of the Neighborhood Study Project, conducted in Louisville, Kentucky, in the spring of 1968. The city at that time had lost the first round competition for the Model Cities Program, and although the morale of the target neighborhood residents had been damaged, some community leaders still were willing to support a…

Describes the activities of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in which student volunteers work as organizers with low income neighborhood groups to help them deal with economic and political issues. Includes ACORN state offices and a community organizer job description. (MF)

Community-based development organizations (CBDOs) appear to be a major force for the economic and physical rejuvenation of distressed, low-income communities. A CBDO is a private nonprofit group that serves a low-income community or constituency, is governed by a community-based board, and is an ongoing producer, with at least one completed…

THIS REPORT OUTLINED THE EXPERIENCES OF EIGHT UNIVERSITIES--CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, DELAWARE, ILLINOIS, MISSOURI, OKLAHOMA, PURDUE, RUTGERS, AND WISCONSIN--AND A NONACADEMIC COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION, ACTION-HOUSING, PITTSBURGH, WHICH HAD RECEIVED FORD FOUNDATION GRANTS FOR URBAN EXTENSION PROGRAMS. EACH ORGANIZATION USED THE APPROACH…

The author reviews the evolution of community development in a social work context in Hong Kong over the past decade, including riots, committees, block development, social actions, and politicization. He also comments on the role of the social worker in this context. (MF)

A switchover by any government to a more integrated, community-based approach to rural development will inevitably require the recruitment, training, and effective "backstopping" of large numbers of front-line workers. (SSH)