shows families primarily supported by informal
and formal associations (circles). The outer ring of
service systems (triangles) offers them a secondary
source of support.
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 a recent IPR report, A Twenty-First Century Map for Healthy Communities and Families (1996), 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 (see diagram).
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| McKnight's revised social map for the 21st century
shows families primarily supported by informal and formal associations (circles). The outer ring of service systems (triangles) offers them a secondary source of support. |
"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 needing 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," he writes in A Twenty-First Century Map, which was published as the lead article in a special issue of Families in Society (March/April 1997), one of the nation's most widely read journals for social workers.
McKnight's ideas have made traditional family agency professionals squirm uncomfortably," acknowledged guest editor Lynn McDonald in her introduction to the special issue, which focused on community development. "However, his ideas need to be heard."
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."
Copies of A Twenty-First Century Map are available from IPR's publications department at a price of $5.00.
In Grand Boulevard, one of Chicago's poorest communities, John McKnight's research team uncovered a rich and varied associational life in which at least 319 groups were involved in an array of activities that ran the gamut from beautifying neighborhoods to fighting drug abuse. A new publication, Voluntary Associations in Low-Income Neighborhoods: An Unexplored Community Resource , provides an "indicative snapshot" of this activity in 1995, based on data gathered from written materials, interviews, and field and phone surveys. The study finds these associations were involved in significant community-building activity, especially caregiving (i.e., working with youth and senior citizens), job training and placement, and dealing with "neighborhood challenges" such as teen pregnancy and child abuse. Though fewer were involved in local economic development, large numbers indicated their willingness to become involved in all of these activities. The publication offers a plan for tapping into this potential and maps out a special role for funders. Copies of the report are available from IPR's publications department at a price of $5.00.