Navigating the Power Dynamics Between Insitutions and Their Communities
Byron White's career experiences—as an impartial observer of community building, as an advocate working from within urban communities, and as a catalyst working from the outside—have given him a unique perspective into the dynamics of institutional/ community engagement. "Basically, they have left me with three overriding convictions. First, the collective work of citizens is essential to any hope of significant, sustained transformation of urban America. Second, institutions can be powerful enablers of such citizen leadership or they can seriously impede it. Third, the determining factor governing which role institutions will play is the nature of the power relationship that is negotiated between citizens and institutions."
Other observations from Navigating the Power Dynamics Between Institutions and Their Communities include: "Institutional leaders frequently express the intent of including everyday resident leaders in their designs. . . . Citizens may be sought for their “input” into these strategic planning efforts, and later they are enlisted to endorse the plan, but they seldom have real authority in deciding what the plan will be," and "The most effective arrangement . . . is that in which the institution’s agent is both sufficiently engaged in the community to genuinely acknowledge and respond to relational forms of social power, and at the same time carries enough clout and credibility within the institution to directly respond to confrontational displays of power."
White concludes that institutions cannot take the friendship of their neighboring communities for granted and they must work diligently to be considered partners; the scales of power are tilted too much in favor of the institution to presume that friendly advances are enough to lure communities into productive partnerships. Citizen leaders are not demanding a seat at the institution’s table; they want to set the table. They want to influence the research that defines their communities’ problems and devise the solutions right alongside the experts who march into their communities, claiming to know the answers. Partnerships between communities and institutions will continue to fail unless institutions concede that the full investment of the citizenry is essential to resolving community problems. Positioning and equipping institutional representatives to operate in a way that recognizes and responds to both confrontational and relational forms of community power—rather than trying to avoid either— are essential to finally getting it right.
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