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Communities at Work

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Kettering has spent more than 25 years studying why some communities work, at least most of the time, and why others seldom do. What accounts for the difference? Why are people in certain communities able to join forces and get a handle on their problems while others aren’t? This is what we mean by a community working. Kettering has learned a great deal about how people in communities work together to solve their problems.

George Frederickson, a leading scholar of public administration, may be right when he says that in the United States we spent the last part of the 20th century building large institutions and systems while forgetting what we knew about communities. That neglect has had a price.

By the end of the century, communities were facing a host of “wicked” problems. These are problems that grow out of weaknesses in a community and then further undermine the sense of community. They have multiple causes, and no one institution or group within the community can solve them.

The most wicked of all the characteristics is that people are troubled by a discrepancy between what is happening to their community and what they think should be happening—yet there is no agreement about what should be done. Since there are no experts on what should be, there aren’t any scientific or technical solutions to these problems.

Examples of wicked problems are all around us—pockets of poverty that persist even in the midst of prosperity (boats that rising tides don’t lift) and troubling gaps in the academic achievement levels of students.

Taking Responsibility

The persistence of wicked problems raises questions about communities that are difficult to answer satisfactorily. Still, one of the characteristics common to communities that are able to manage, if not solve, their problems is that citizens take responsibility for their future. You might say that they own their problems, rather than expecting someone to save them.

Take New Orleans: several years after Hurricane Katrina hit and the levees failed, certain neighborhoods are thriving while others are still devastated. For example, the people who immigrated to this area from North Vietnam were faced with religious and political persecution before being hit by the hurricane, but they began restoring Viet Village on the outskirts of New Orleans as soon as the floodwaters went down. And those in Tremé, a historically African American neighborhood in the inner city, drew on survival skills and norms of mutual assistance that have developed over more than a century.

The question is, how does this sense of collective responsibility develop in a place where people don’t share a common history, which is often the case in today’s communities?

Start Small

Civic leaders often want to know how to get people to work together in the interest of the entire community. There are those who say the key is dedication to the good of all. In places where there are a large number of people devoted to the common good, this may be fine.

However, that isn’t always the case. The foundation’s research suggests it is possible to strengthen communities by starting with small groups of neighbors and their self-interests, which aren’t necessarily selfish interests. To start small is to recognize cities and towns are comprised of many little neighborhoods, each with its own distinctive hopes and concerns. They are like coral reefs that appear to be monolithic but are actually made up of thousands of coral colonies.

One of the most dramatic examples of starting with small groups and their interests comes from Tupelo, Mississippi, which despite once being known as the poorest town in the poorest county in the poorest state, is now known for citizen-based efforts that have turned rural poverty into regional prosperity. The transformation began when small settlements decided to initiate improvement projects to serve local interests. People in one neighborhood might have cleaned up an eyesore while those in another might have built playgrounds.

What people did isn’t as important as the fact that they did it themselves. Citizens acting on their immediate concerns year after year eventually changed the politics of the entire Tupelo community. It created a sense of local responsibility and an appreciation for what people could do by working together.

Citizens taking responsibility also makes it easier for the local government and schools to be more effective. Kettering research shows that if citizens aren’t active in solving some of their problems, local institutions are often overwhelmed by unrealistic expectations about what they can do.

Working Together

We all know, of course, that communities have to deal with problems that don’t respect local boundaries. In fact, no community is totally self-sufficient. As people work on solving local problems, one of the first things they often realize is that they cannot solve their problems alone. They recognize that they are interdependent; they need resources others have. One community made this discovery by asking in their meetings, who else needs to be in this room to solve the problem we are facing?

In many cases, the necessary people are absent because they don’t live in the neighborhood or, even more problematic, because their neighbors don’t like them. Still, they are needed to combat problems that spill over from one area to another—problems like crime and pollution.

Kettering has seen this interdependence illustrated in many ways, but none is more powerful than the story of two civic leaders who worked together for years—until one died. Friends of the survivor rushed to comfort him. “You must be sad to lose such a good friend,” they said. “Actually, I never really liked the guy,” was the response. “But why did you two work together so closely?” they asked. The answer they got was simply, “I needed him.”

Overcoming Barriers

Unfortunately, citizens’ recognition of their interdependence can be blocked in several ways. One is the perception that if people don’t share the interests of community leaders and local officials, they don’t have any civic interests.

The foundation, however, has found that people are most affected by those they live near and by conditions in the community that touch their daily lives. (The only people who have no interest in what is happening around them are in cemeteries.) Most people want to be secure from danger, free from constraints, and treated fairly, regardless of who they are. Engaging them has to be based on engaging their concerns.

Another barrier to recognizing our interdependence is the perception that there are some people who don’t have anything to contribute to solving common problems because they are poor or have little formal education. However, studies of low-income neighborhoods have shown that many of these citizens have unique abilities and unrecognized and untapped capacities that grow out of their life experiences. These capacities are magnified when citizens join forces and act together.

Even in communities where people recognize their interdependence, they still have to overcome another major obstacle, and that is the widespread feeling that they can’t make a difference. They often don’t know how to get meaningfully involved, and the typical advice to vote or volunteer doesn’t seem like enough. Frustration with problems that won’t go away turns to cynicism. So communities have to become open to all citizens, not just key stakeholders. And that requires more than just having open meetings with plenty of publicity.

The “secret” is making regular routines citizen friendly. Kettering research suggests this doesn’t require communities to do anything different but to do the ordinary differently.

Naming Problems

Every day, problems are recognized and named in communities. It may be an academic institution, interest group, or government official that is naming the problem. The name each gives a problem comes out of professional expertise, special interests, or official policy.

There is nothing wrong with any of that—except that the names based on the concerns of citizens usually aren’t included. These are the fundamental concerns referred to earlier—security, freedom, fairness, and so on.

People’s concerns are often intangible, as illustrated in a story Wendell Berry tells about the reaction of a group of farmers listening to an economist explain that they could make more money if they rented rather than bought land. The economist was technically correct, but sometimes that isn’t enough. As one farmer explained, “My people didn’t come to this country to be renters.”

When the things people care deeply about are reflected in the names given to problems, people are more likely to become engaged, which is the first step to being able to make a difference.

Another essential step is for citizens to identify what they can do about their problems. This usually begins to happen as people name a problem. The different concerns they bring to a problem imply different actions to address it.

In everyday conversations, you can hear people asking one another, if this bothers you so much, what do you think we should do? For every problem, there are multiple courses of action to consider. Unfortunately, many community decisions are framed around just one or two options for action, and they don’t require citizens to do anything.

Such frameworks invite a polarizing debate, which not only limits progress but also drives away those who don’t care for the controversy. However, when problems are framed in a way that puts all the major options on the table and identifies what people can do, it opens the door for citizens.

Acting Together

It isn’t enough for people to see that their concerns and the options they favor are being considered. Ultimately, citizens have to act together if they are going to make the difference they hope to. Citizens acting together is the defining characteristic of communities that work. So communities have to have entry points for citizens to act in concert with one another.

People are more likely to act together if they have collectively decided how to act. That’s just common sense. And yet deciding together requires confronting differences of opinion about what should be done and then working through those differences, at least to the point that they don’t prevent collective action. People are more likely to be able to work through differences if they consider all of the proposed approaches to a problem fairly and weigh each one against all they consider valuable for the community.

As they weigh their options, people often gain a more complete understanding of the nature of the problem and the resources needed to combat it. This careful weighing is not judicial deliberation but public deliberation; it doesn’t have to produce complete agreement, only a broad sense of direction for moving ahead.

Public deliberation can set in motion a variety of actions by different groups that are capable of reinforcing or complementing each other. Citizens are more likely to take responsibility for what they have decided to do on their own than for something they have been persuaded to do by those in positions of authority.

“Leaderful” Communities

Reporting on the importance of making communities more open to citizens typically prompts the question, what about leaders, aren’t they critical? Research done by Kettering and many others shows that they are. Nothing ever happens without someone stepping up to take the initiative. Still, in comparing communities that work with those that don’t, we have found that high-achieving communities have many more leaders or people taking initiative and that these people come from all over town.

The communities are “leaderful,” and their leaders play unconventional roles; for instance, they are door openers rather than gatekeepers. And these leaders work to strengthen the civic capacity of the community, a capacity that is developed as people name problems to reflect their concerns, create frameworks for decision making that put all of the options for action on the table, and deliberate when opinions differ.

Collective Learning

The most frequent question the foundation is asked about communities is whether there is some surefire method for solving community problems that will produce measurable results quickly. Those asking this question seem to be looking for some technique or best practice they can copy.

We have to confess that we haven’t found such a thing and don’t believe one exists. Nonetheless, we have found one key characteristic of high-achieving communities in which citizens make a difference. In a word, it is learning, not personal learning but shared or collective learning.

Learning communities are like ideal students in that they study everything but copy nothing. For them, imitation is a limitation. They experiment and examine the results, not so much to determine whether they were successful, but to find out what they need to do next. Like inventors, they have learned the most important lesson of all, which is to fail successfully.

Everything communities do—from the way they name problems, to the deliberations they use to decide how to act, to acting collaboratively—is an opportunity for continuous learning. And this gives them the ability to keep up the momentum needed to combat persistent problems.

Because they are always learning, these communities recognize that no success is forever, and no failure is defeat.

Kettering Foundation

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