Community Building and Delivery of Services: Two Distinct Paradigms
Published in The Roundtable, vol. 3, no. 3 (April 2000), p. 9

Many human-service organizations and practitioners are questioning how far service delivery takes them as a family-strengthening strategy. Among questions they are asking:

• Has service delivery resolved social ills?
• Do clients regress when they return to their home environment?
• Is the expense of service delivery justified by the results achieved?
• Is external support from government- and private-funding sources sufficiently dependable to design long-range strategies capable of producing lasting change?

Such concerns have fueled interest in community building. This approach, however, is distinct from delivering services in important ways. For those colleagues who wish to explore community-centered practice, the following general features distinguish the two paradigms.

Focus on Neighborhood or Community
Community building centers on a neighborhood or community, defined as a group of people who interact regularly with each other and share common associations and institutions. Service delivery usually is cast in terms of a "target population" defined by characteristics of the people served, such as being "at risk" of some problem. Such populations are invariably dispersed and may never have opportunities outside of their in-program contact to interact with each other. Insofar as delivery of services rides on such concepts, it is at odds with community building.

Focus on Social Organization
The mission of community building is to strengthen social organization. This means supporting or creating social links, which tend to be reused, and encouraging use of existing relationships for multiple (i.e., multistranded) purposes. (It is community-centered and relational. Service delivery customarily tries to remedy problems, manage or reduce risk, or prevent an undesirable condition in a person or family and sometimes in a neighborhood. It does not embody the concept of systematic social relations as an arena of practice. Service delivery is fundamentally trait-centered and unit-based.

The Role of "Collective Efficacy"
Community building seeks to enhance the ability of a neighborhood to engage in collective problem solving. By contrast, service delivery embodies the premise that individuals, families, and neighborhoods need additional (externally provided) resources to create quality of life.

Capacity Building
Community building seeks to enhance the underlying capacity of individuals and neighborhoods to manage for themselves by imparting new abilities, skills, and experiences or by restructuring and brokering relationships. This augments the human, economic, and social capital in play. It is fundamentally growth oriented. By contrast, delivering services acts by diagnosing problems in a client (individual, family, or neighborhood) and then applying professional knowledge and external resources to fix them. The professional expertise generally does not transfer to the client, nor do the resources generally devolve to control by neighborhood residents.

Strengths Based
Community building must be strengths based by its very nature. (We define the existence of social connections as a strength.) There is no alternative in a capacity-building enterprise. By contrast, delivering services is deficit based. Insofar as service delivery takes account of neighborhood, it operates out of a "needs assessment" rather than an inventory of resources.