A Twenty-First Century Map for Healthy Communities and Families
Community associations ranging from Bible study groups to block clubs may hold the key to social reform and revival in the 21st century, according to IPR's director of community studies, John McKnight . In this new report, McKnight unveils a revised "social map" that pushes large bureaucratic service systems to the fringes of the community and replaces them with newly empowered associations as the primary support for families.
"Associations provide the power that mobilizes a person with a missing leg to use his carpentry skills to build a community center," says McKnight, who is fond of noting that professional services see the same person as disabled and in need of help.
To harness this communal power requires a paradigm shift in policy assumptions, says McKnight, who argues that policymakers must divert resources from service systems to provide more economic opportunity for the poor. He insists they give community economic development priority over remedial or compensatory services, and prepurchase services only as a last resort.
McKnight, who also co-directs IPR's Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute, is convinced that the public has grown dubious of the proposition that pouring more dollars, resources, professionals, training and technology into large systems will stem social ills: "Increasingly, research scholars and foundation experimentalists are lending less and less support for the policy map of a family surrounded by expanding services."
McKnight has long contended that large social service systems depend for their existence upon needs to fix, namely "the deficiency, inadequacy, brokenness, or disease of people," which turns them into clients. In his view, associational communities depend upon the capacities, gifts, and skills of people, which lead ultimately to citizen power.
In McKnight's revised social model, associations provide a context for communal care and mutual support, especially in times of crisis. They offer the potential for rapid and individualized responses to local problems, free of red tape, and allow individual talents to be more easily discovered and put to use in solving local problems. This, in turn, encourages citizens to take responsibility and develop leadership, and the community becomes a seedbed for developing local enterprise.
"Because the dominant social policy map does not recognize the associational community, it is a fatal guide to the 21st century," McKnight warns. "It will lead to the shoals of a serviced society surrounded by a sea of social failure."
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