When personal imperative becomes social necessity, there develops a calling, and so it has been with my neighborhood organizing. Raised in a quasi-intentional micro community, enriched by Quakerly Sunday meetings, skating parties and collective bonfires, I have always simply assumed that neighbors will come together to socialize, celebrate, and respond to shared problems. Awakened as a teenager to the developing world through a American Friends Service Committee work camp, I later joined the Peace Corps to do urban organizing in Colombia, and soon after arriving as a college teacher in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I again found myself calling meetings to address local needs.
In recent decades it has become ever clearer that the deep
forces of our time threaten community at every level. Without a sense of
collective caring, trust and purpose, many thinkers further warn, neither our
families, neighborhoods, nor metropolitan areas, neither our nation nor the
world as a whole, can well survive. Our capacity to hold together, resolve
problems, and maintain freedoms is in jeopardy.
I yearned to enter the fray, but serious questions remained. Was it really possible to sustain or rebuild community in the face of those threatening "deep forces"? On what level and through what mechanisms might such an initiative be mounted, and was there any role within it for my students, whose inexperience and semester-length perspective seemingly leave them unfit for any complex social intervention? For Kalamazoo, like many of our cities, was rich in students. Could their energies and developmental needs somehow be matched productively with community-based challenges and resources?
In response to these questions, Building Blocks of Kalamazoo started with an insight drawn from both theory and experience: that the point of entry ought to be the individual street. It is here, as Jane Jacobs reminds us, that the success or failure of urban life is finally determined. If local streets fail to keep abreast of their problems, as they all too frequently do, neighborhoods will falter.
Building Blocks' immediate objective is to engage each street-based target site in collective work projects, emphasizing small-scale exterior fix-up and beautification activities. Federal "Block Grant" dollars funneled through the city, supplemented with local foundation support, enable us to offer each site some $6000, most of it for house paint and driveway gravel, fencing, shrubs, dumpster rentals and the like. Residents themselves, joined by college students and other community volunteers, do the work itself, on both a self-help and cooperative basis. The availability of material supplies directly appeals to people's self-interest, but we seek immediately to broaden that motivation, inducing residents to recognize how much they depend upon their neighbors and making cooperation a condition for participation. At first residents scarcely recognize even close-by neighbors, but gradually they come to realize that the reputation and worth of their own homes depends largely on the whole street's revival. Drawing upon real but much atrophied traditions of neighboring, core groups of residents take on the hard work of planning and implementing the workdays, discovering along the way how much they enjoy one another.
Wholesale use of trained college student organizers enables
Building Blocks to target individual streets. Based in a seminar facilitated by
the author, student participants (numbering 22 this past year) work in teams of
three under the general guidance of target site supervisors appointed by the
area-wide neighborhood association. Readings and in-class orientations prepare
students to undertake the intensive door-to-door canvassing that marks the first
stage of organizing, then to support residents as they plan and implement the
workdays. To compensate for students'
inherent inexperience and short-term outlook, the program provides considerable
structure: the general goals, the basic process, and the project budget all are
clear from the outset. What remains are the details, all to be set by residents
themselves.
Other principles employed by the project will be familiar to many. Our student organizers are trained to seek out residents' assets: leadership experience; painting, construction, and food preparation skills; contacts with churches and businesses; and, not least of all, the capacity for empathy and mutual support. Drawing on our students' most passionate convictions, we also promote inclusivity. Nowhere is economic and socio-cultural diversity and the challenges it poses to the building of social capital more real than on our hard-pressed urban streets. By collectively undertaking the planning and implementation of public work projects, residents come to recognize each other's strengths and communality of interests. Finally, we seek above all to empower local residents, our ultimate goal being both to reinvigorate street-level networks and to involve residents in the wider neighborhood and city networks where the larger work of our democracy takes place.
These organizing approaches (which lend themselves, we are finding, to the local production of many services in addition to fix-up projects) consistently succeed in mobilizing local residents, even when (as is typical) they hardly know each other before hand. But...
How lasting are the resulting street-level networks?
Does it not strain the imagination that a ten-week project could have appreciable long-term effects?
Two considerations prove relevant to this key question. First, Building Blocks always has been seen as just one part of a much broader neighborhood strategy (including economic development and the encouragement of homeownership, for example) . Even for the reconstruction of street-level social capital, moreover, we have devised affiliated "follow-up" activities. We provide "continuation grants" that encourage residents in earlier target sites to pull themselves together once again, this time without student organizers, to undertake a second round of cooperative projects. We also identify able individuals who emerge through the initial projects and engage them either as student supervisors or as participants in an advanced training program especially crafted for street-level leaders. Neighborhood associations also look upon emergent local leaders as prime candidates for involvement on their committees and boards of directors, and our sponsoring housing agency considers them prime candidates for home repair loans. In short, Building Blocks is increasingly well integrated into broader neighborhood and housing agency programming.
Second, there does exist considerable anecdotal evidence suggesting that Building Blocks' impact may often endure. Well after the conclusion of work activities, for example, resident participants in one target site responded energetically to the bludgeoning death of a neighbor, working collectively with police and other city staff. In a second area, residents collaborated in a successful drive to evict a drug dealer from a local apartment house. In yet another site neighbors have continually pressured both city government and a city-wide housing agency to refurbish local units in need of attention. Overall, although not systematically studied, informal evidence suggests that the personal networks now present in at least some of our target sites have gained considerable strength.
Benefits for student participants are more obvious. Students
grow markedly in their sense of personal effectiveness and social
responsibility. They come to see that engagement in the work of local community
is no less a matter of civic obligation than of personal altruism, and they gain
impressive experience in the "arts
of democracy":
their ability to connect with people across boundaries of 
race and class, speak
on behalf of collective initiatives, run meetings, and cope with conflict. They
develop insights into the sobering realities of our struggling urban
neighborhoods and, perhaps most important, begin questioning why such realities
have emerged and how they might be addressed.
As one tool for regenerating social capital, Building Blocks stands as a source of hope. Clearly there are forces abroad in American society that undermine local community. But our culture remains multi-dimensional; there is much in our souls that is generous, much that yearns for neighborliness and neighborhood renewal. In fact, there are many strengths in our people upon which we can build, reviving faith in our cities and in our society more generally.
Kim Cummings is professor of sociology at Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan. A long-time organizer in in Kalamazoo, his research and service interests focus on neighborhood revitalization. For more information, contact Kim.