GCD Reflection 2.12.09

Reading the first chapter of Streets of Hope, I kept encountering a theme of powerlessness. The power over where to live and the safety and security of their homes and livelihood seemed to be entirely outside of their hands. Bothwell comments on how this affected the community: “It was like a sense of having no allies. People were really powerless.” As a reader and encountering the information that instilled a sense of despair as to the hope of the community that I was learning about, approaching this assignment of discovering the power map of the Dudley Street Neighborhood is daunting. It seems that no matter the intent of the community to serve the interests of the constituency yet they are still unable to make any progress because they are unable to get past the “gatekeeper” as Ganz puts it.
However, if power is going to be defined as being “not a thing, attribute, quality, characteristic, or trait – it is a relationship,” then I can begin to understand how to go about thinking of the power of the Dudley Street Neighborhood. The issue I am examining is the housing issue. The interests of the community I would assume to be to own or rent properties that are in adequate conditions and free from institutional methods of discrimination and debilitation against tenants and homeowners. Bothwell is quoted as saying “We were trying…to figure out some way to build some sort of a land trust… that would place control of the land in the hands of community people.”
The needs of the community are for the most part able to be satisfied through acquired resources. The city, the realtors, and policy makers, benefactors hold the resources needed to address these interests from the public and private sector, and philanthropists. Unfortunately, educational resources need to be made available to the Dudley Street Neighborhood in order for them to recognize the avenue of finding support from philanthropists or other external organizations/individuals. As we saw in Bridging the Class Divide, the town of Midway was unable to acquire power in order to change the relationship between their neighborhood and the forces that effect it until the community of Midway had been provided access to educational and informational resources that would allow them to begin to formulate how to go about finding balance and justice.
The members of the community who are attempting to have their issues heard and recognized represent the first “face of power” of the Dudley Street Neighborhood. The specific individuals would be the organizing team led by Bothwell and aided by the person from the Department of Agriculture. However, comparable to the African Americans of the civil rights movement, their urges for recognition and assistance with the housing issue were blocked by the “gatekeeper”.
The city officials who laughed at the people of the Dudley Street Neighborhood are the people responsible for the disparity of power of the community, because they act as the third “face of power.” These are the forces that maintain the feeling of hopelessness that the community is met with and reinforce internalized oppression. The power in the hands of the city officials is removed directly, by having the issues blocked up front through neglect as well as through resistance to cooperate. It is also removed indirectly through the use of accusations of the character of the group attempting to obtain a balance of power. In the 1979 BRA report, the Dudley community is accused of being apathetic, lacking organization, and lacking commitment and willingness to change the state of their community. This paints the Dudley street community as being responsible, and by presenting them this way, policy makers, philanthropists, and other outside supports are less likely to aid the Dudley neighborhood by providing resources.
It is not that the Dudley community does not to improve their community or that they are not organizing themselves to do so, rather, the problem is that the power is being withheld and made unattainable to the community. The decisions of policy makers and federal agencies such as the FHA and the Boston city officials hoping to profit off of the destruction of a community because they are racially and economically biased, makes it an extremely daunting endeavor for the community to obtain safe and secure homes. Not only that, but these are people who are economically disadvantaged due to the racist institution that constricts the options of the community, and thus have limited time and existing resources.
As power is being withheld from the group by officials and by the constraints of the community’s resources, the ability to meet the needs of the constituency is handicapped. I believe that the group is going to have to use the model illustrated by Linda Stout with the PPP in order to find a new avenue in which to obtain their goals of having the land be in control of the community.


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In both the Kretzman and the Stout readings, it is made clear that the change that low-income disadvantaged communities deserve to see come to fruition is not going to come from the top down. Stout discusses at length how it is important that the community first empower themselves and educate themselves before they are able to make change first to the immediate needs such as safety and hygiene of the community (trash dumping, road access, etc.) and then later to make the changes to policy and national issues that will affect the vitality of the community from the top-down. A multi-directional approach does not need to be seen as binary (top-down vs. bottom-up), rather it could be seen as cyclical and more of a closed loop. This should be the goal of philanthropists, community organizers, and social justice activists.
Stout tells us in Bridging the Class Divide that she had aversions and resentments toward the upper middle class white organizers who wanted to make decisions for the benefit of the communities they were working with. This restricted the interests of the communities or issues they were working to support, by placing the interests of the organizers in front of the interests of the community. Additionally, the majority of these sorts of organizations are using the model described by Kretzman and McKnight as being a “Needs-Driven Dead End.” By using this model, the lives of the individuals are made easier and yes, small improvements do happen.
A friend of mine is working on a project in Springfield right now that reminds me of the successes of working to benefit the homeless and reduce homelessness in the city. Project Homeless Connect originated in San Francisco and has been spreading city to city to reduce homelessness and help serve the individual needs of those who do not have shelter for the night. She told me that they go out on Monday nights and stay out nearly the whole night trying to find people sleeping on the streets to give them blankets, food, and help them find shelter. This seems like one of those “leaky pipe problems” of attempting to put a band-aid on a gaping wound, and that more people should perhaps be directing their efforts at reforming policy and working from the top down to address the issue of national homelessness. However, Project Homeless Connect has only been in operation in Springfield for a little over a year, and already there is over 40% less people sleeping on the streets than their was before the project began. The motto of Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco is that “It will take all of our collective help to end homelessness in San Francisco – help from government, from business, from non-profit agencies, and from individual community members.”
This organization is another example, like the Piedmont Peace Project, of an attempt to make the community better for all involved in the community by using a closed-loop and all-inclusive approach to achieving the goals. This is the capacity-focused development approach in work. The capacity of the individuals of the community might be limited due to lack of resources, however if the education and information is provided to the immediate community to achieve both the immediate needs as well as working towards a long-term goal through the building and negotiation of relationships (the definition of power according to Ganz), then the community might become enabled to work towards a goal that is in the interests of the constituency rather than having external agencies decide what the interests of the constituency is.
Having worked as a teacher, I find myself often experiencing confliction over what direction to work from. Do I want to get involved with reforming policy by advocating for these underrepresented groups and making public their issues through the use of publications of written works? Do I want to be in the classroom helping to teach those most in need? What I have realized is that I cannot advocate for a group that I have not become a part of myself. It is more important for me to involve myself in a community by providing the resources that are withheld from low-income urban neighborhoods, and helping the individual members of the community discover how to meet their goals on their own terms.