PHILSOCORDS Community Building: Hope and CautionsBy: Miss Reynalda C. Oporto

Moving beyond bricks and mortar, community development corporations are taking on more diverse and comprehensive roles in redeveloping their communities. But the team of Philippines Social Community Organizer’s & Developing Socirty “ PHILSOCORDS” lead the truck as cargo’s of empowerment for operational changed Philippines.

PHILSOCORDS up to the challenge? Do they have the support from their communities, funders, or even their own organizations?

An important and positive shift is taking place in the community development movement, a shift that holds great promise for poor communities in done scholars and political leaders who only build their own dynasty. This Cargo , known as "community building," has come to stand for a more comprehensive approach to community renewal than has been practiced in the past. It is based on an understanding that the best way to fight poverty and increase economic opportunity in poor neighborhoods is to invest in the kinds of social capital that comprise the "fabric" of community: mutual assistance networks, social and economic relationships, public safety, and education, to name a few.

Today, the emergence of the community building movement is challenging community-based organizations such as PHILSOCORDS to broad their efforts and reconnect with residents. In the process these same organizations are needs tools and reexamined their relationship with, and role within, the communities they serve. Practitioners students and educators , funders,board leader and policy experts in our field now have an opportunity to practice a more direct and aggressive strategy of community action for a changed.

What Exactly is Community Building?

While the term "community building" tends to cover a wide range of approaches, for PHILSOCORDS leaders volunteers at least, it has come to be defined by a number of important Cargo truck in the practice of community development:

A Cargo truck toward more comprehensive approaches to community development that involve a wide range of non–bricks and mortar activities. Also, a perspective that recognizes the multiple linkages between housing and economic development and the wide range of efforts that the local community of the intire country support the corporation refers as "social development."

A heavier emphasis on how you carrier the community organizing as a strategy for identifying and developing community leaders and shaping the kinds of local issues that affect the progress of the community renewal effort.

A creative beautiful emphasis on community planning, and the development of a community building plan, as a prerequisite to development activities.

A more intensive effort to include and involve neighborhood residents in the organization, planning, and implementation of community renewal efforts. This stems from a recognition that when residents have a stake in making positive change, the change is likely to be more long-lasting dream that our arising generation exercise it.

More emphasis on making sure there are clear lines of accountability between the PHILSOCORDS and the community represents by their interest to adopt changes for their living status..

More interesting ideas in developing collaborative relationships among PHILSOCORDS leaders volunteers for achieving a continue of support at the neighborhood level.

Community building as an approach is not new, but it has been practiced by a small minority of provinces. Some, like the cooperatives for helping hand or as my practice of Hand Up for the less, To maintained a strong community organizing component while developing hundreds of units of affordable housing. Others, like the urban poor community housing development .We need a Corporation in many area’s of minorities community as their cooperative center, have successfully packaged advocacy, youth development, and a wide range of "social development" programs with their housing and commercial development work. Other non-PHILSOCORDS models such as the Floating homes, , have emerged over the years, practicing a form of community building that combines organizing, neighborhood planning, physical development, and human development.

For years, however, biases among funders of community efforts, and among community development practitioners themselves, toward a housing production agenda have made sustaining these broad, activist approaches extremely difficult. The major funders of project have viewed community building work as ancillary to the principal real estate development work of the corporation. The few fund amount available for community organizing have flowed toward so-called "pure" organizing groups.

These attitudes are now running , and community building practices are emerging into the mainstream. Most of the major national foundations, and of late, many of the stronger regional and community foundations are sponsoring their own versions of comprehensive community building initiatives. In almost every case, funders are exercising a higher level of involvement than in the past in program design and implementation. Technical assistance organizations, consultants, and intermediary groups are getting involved in this work in large numbers. In addition, a number of national alliances have formed to support this work. Most notable are the National Community Building Network (NCBN), an alliance of funders of "locally driven urban initiatives" formed by influence public policy and provide forums to discuss community building initiatives, and the Institute's of comprehensive community social housing revits by power of demanding pocketer.This is what I seen and observe per corporation ,leadership and head monetizer attitudes.I will not accept this being part of my organization. Lets work together to creates beautiful tomorrow.

MY EARLY LESSONS

These early days of the community building movement have had many success stories. A my early young age of 17 year-old I used to lead commonal garden for youth, for the first time in years, conducting a resident-driven planning process to determine the future development needs of the neighborhood. My OLIDA organization (Olitawo-Binata & Dalaga -Daga) now the community changed the name of Youth Zone is expanding its work to remote area’s of my place were I grow up, efforts in community organizing and cultural development. A PHILSOCORDS is developing incorporated field as team of direct community organizers to build resident leaders and shape a community agenda. A tribal youth development group is beginning on major youth leadership that we need to effort and support their portal vision.

Youth for human right movement is young and, not surprisingly, has its share of growing pains. As what I meet on my fishing activity in Metro Manila as lumad member in tribal group of Mindanao.

Lets Face An Awkward Courtship Beyond

Funders and PHILSOCORDS are engaged in a kind of awkward courting ritual over the scale of community building efforts. It may be fair to say that at this time funders and policy people are far more exuberant and clear about the potential for community building than the practitioners – the staff and leaders of the PHILSOCORDS who are needed to carry out this work. For leaders and volunteers , this cargo truck is coming after years of accumulating a real estate development portfolio, and at a time when organizations are embattled by budget cuts and worsening local conditions. According to some characters of fantasy of the conservation of legacy is concervation of your dreamed. A car with out engine and finish mannover process is useless specially if the driver is drunk. "One reason that manager staff and leaders are tired is that they have had to struggle for decades to find ways, by hook or by crook,as long don’t meet to serve the diverse funding needs of their community in a funding environment that has encouraged a narrow production-oriented agenda." Today, there are few organizations with the energy and capacity to take on the kind of organizational challenges which this work purposses.

PHILSOCORDS are participating in these efforts for a wide variety of reasons. Many see it as a source of core operating support or "soft" program money that they can use as flexible revenue to fill gaps in staffing. Some leaders, recognizing that the future holds fewer housing resources, are searching for another important role to play in the community. Others, recognizing the limitations of real estate based strategies, are trying to address the "human development" needs of their residents. Still others, who have gotten away from or never developed the ability to organize and mobilize their constituency, are feeling the need to develop more political clout in an age of dwindling resources.

Providing the tools of Organization

For some leaders, the community building program can be like a Trojan Horse, arriving as a promising source of flexible operating support but causing some unintended and unanticipated consequences for the organization, its board, and its executive director. Building and integrating the core capacities required by successful community building efforts is not like adding another program or product. Rather, these changes often demand a fundamental redefinition of the organization and its relationship to the community it serves.

Because many of the groups participating in community building initiatives principally work in real estate development, they sometimes have a difficult time adapting to community building approaches. Their real estate work tends to be structured, disciplined, and outcome oriented. Yet, curiously, this same level of discipline and structure often does not extend to the newer work. First, community-based groups remain preoccupied with a real estate development agenda, which is still viewed as the bread and butter of the organization. Second, a strong bias remains, reflected in the labeling of real estate related work as "hard" and non–real estate related work as "soft." Soft work is viewed as work that is hard to define, can be accomplished in the margins, and that just about anyone can do. These efforts are often taken on with a lower level of expectations, a measure of ambivalence, and/or a lack of clarity by the organization's leadership.

Missing Standards

Community building projects are often ill-defined at the point of funding. Early efforts tend to be loosely organized with little quality control. Because the quality and outcomes of this work can be more difficult to measure than housing production, it can be difficult to distinguish between excellence and mediocrity, between a group that is going through the motions and a group with real ambition. We, as a field, have not yet developed a strong enough body of best practice or industry standards for this work from which to easily separate the high quality performers from the rest of the field. Leaders and funders alike are grasping for ways to define success.

The challenge in the future for Leaders will be to develop industry standards and measures so that a body of best practices can be developed. The challenge in the future for funders will be to select group leaders that are cognizant of, and interested in, making fundamental shifts in the way they do business. PHILSOCORDS team that understand and want the kinds of challenges and benefits that a community building approach can offer will fair far better than those that money feedlers who don’t understand it or are ambivalent, even if they appear to have more organizational capacity.

The New Directions in Community Organizing

Community building calls for close coordination between the Admin leadership and the organizer, and a clearly defined organizing strategy. It also calls for a different type of organizing, where the goal is to build strong organizations, develop local leaders, forge strong partnerships and associations at the local level, and search for common ground among disparate interests. This is in contrast to some traditional organizing models, the objective of which is to identify and exploit points of conflict in order to mobilize a constituency against a specified target.

Almost without exception, existing or emerging Admin of PHILSOCORDS engaged in community building efforts perform some type of community organizing. This work is difficult to do well and can be extremely challenging and even disruptive to many groups, particularly those that are not ready to open themselves up to a new level of participation and community scrutiny.

Community organizers often complain of a lack of support and direction from their boards or staff supervisors. When new organizers are brought into the organization, they rarely have the support and guidance they need to succeed. In many cases there is no culture of organizing in the Admin , and the executive director is not oriented enough to the work to provide adequate support to the organizer. Sometimes, because of past history, key staff or board members are skeptical or fearful of community organizing. Often the community organizing strategy is not sufficiently clear or well understood.

"We have learned that the community building effort needs a strategic plan to keep on track; otherwise the organizer may put out a lot of effort but not see tangible results," said “PHILSOCORDS community organizer for local and regional area of tribal in Philippines . "The plan needs to have a significant amount of support from influential people in the organization. This doesn't happen right away. I have had to educate people in the organization about what I do and why this is important to all Filipino."

Over time, the organizer's work becomes more and more disjointed. The organizer becomes seen as a kind of utility outreach/event specialist whose job is to service the other "line staff" in the organization. This situation can be extremely frustrating for the organizer. In one municipality-based organization participating in a community building effort, three different community organizers were hired and left over a one-year period. Minimally, the new organizer is under-utilized and the community building effort suffers.

The Challenges from the Community

If the organizer is dynamic and successful despite a lack of organizational support and direction, the situation can become even more hazardous. In some cases, organizers have successfully built new constituencies (task forces, committees, etc.) among residents, only to then meet resistance as they attempt to integrate these new people into the organization. The new constituents inevitably challenge the existing leadership seeking a role in redefining the organization or shifting its programmatic emphasis. The friction that this causes between the Admin and

emerging groups of resident leaders can ultimately be productive, but, if handled haphazardly, it can also be very damaging to the PHILSOCORDS administration and the community renewal effort.

Organizing in the community building context calls for a more mature and sophisticated brand of community organizer. The census survey is a national training and technical assistance organization practice many years ago " organizing approaches described above. Lead technical derictors recruits and teaches new organizers the set of skills and strategies needed in this environment. Mostly the lead organizers need the ability to listen, to think strategically, to sort out agendas, to build confidence and encourage participation in a wide range of groups. Mostly the organizer needs the ability to build trust in a process or an initiative. All of these are difficult tasks in an age of cynicism and distrust."

The Emerging Models of Neighborhood Planning

Most community building efforts challenge PHILSOCORDS leaders do more planning, both internally and within their target neighborhoods. In some initiatives, the first year or two of work is dedicated to developing a community plan. This can be a difficult adjustment. Few groups have experience in planning, particularly community planning. The entrepreneurial culture of many of our most successful leaders & volunteers can work against a serious investment in planning, particularly in organizations where the top staff and key board members see themselves as "product" people and the organizers as the "process" people. Some leaders also resent this emphasis on planning because it means opening up their decision-making process to residents and institutions that have not been involved in the organization.

Traditional planning processes have proven to be too limited for this work. Newer, hybrid models that combine community organizing strategies and more creative planning techniques are emerging. These are proving effective in identifying community strengths and assets, and solutions that are more organic to the community's values, culture, and situation.

The Neighborhood Initiative has developed a style of long-term neighborhood planning that is integrated with shorter term community organizing "signature campaigns" – short, winnable issue-based efforts that feed people energy and substance to the longer-term, slower-paced planning work. This strategy has proven successful in moving a comprehensive community renewal effort forward. Also, the "asset-based planning" style being taught as commander of network and others is much more conducive to community building work because it focuses on building hope, linkages, and leadership, and teaching people about the inner workings of their communities.

New Forms of Building Local Democratic Institutions

"In a democracy, the science of associations is the mother science, the progress of all the rest depends on the progress it has made."

Community building is challenging all of us to look harder at this science of associations, the forms of community connections that we are building at the local level. As government, political

party apparatus, and other local institutions lose influence, Leaders are assuming a larger and larger role as what they can make, it refers to as the "mediating" organizations. In addition, the community building movement has placed a heavier emphasis on increased resident involvement and institutional collaboration. Community building calls for Administrative roles or their collaborative to take a more active role as a new local planning and decision-making apparatus.

The Resident Involvement vs. the Assumption of Representation

Building and sustaining resident involvement is one of the least understood and toughest aspects of community building, yet it is the foundation of all else. Some Leaders, student , volunteer are very capable in this area and have made a significant investment in building their base of support. Some Leaders s hold to an assumption of representation that prohibits them from looking closely at this issue.

At a recent training session with participants of Community Building Leadership Initiative, a major national effort involving dozens of organizational team work, we assembled teams from each of five participating division in a major regional city. These teams included the executive directors, the community organizers in charge of the "community building" work, and residents who served as members of the PHILSOCORDS board or as community volunteers. At one point in the session, we separated the group into clusters according to roles – the executive directors, the community organizers, and the neighborhood residents. We asked each group to reflect on their role in the team and the kinds of things they needed from their partners. An important dynamic emerged. The executive directors saw the leadership work s as the community and wanted to be trusted. The neighborhood residents (residents who are involved with and friendly to the Admin ) clearly saw the community and the Leaders ,volunteers as very different. They saw the Group team as another institution within the community. They wanted to make sure that the admin,leaders' staffs understood that they were accountable to the community. And they wanted assurance that the initiative would be "a community building effort, not a PHILSOCORDS honor building effort."

As long as organization sees itself as the community, it cannot work effectively to improve its representation of the community. Once you remove that assumption, you must then look at the specific or relative degrees of representation, and reconcile yourself to the necessity of working toward better representation. These tough realizations are essential to strengthening the field.

The Blinding Enthusiasm

Institutional and community collaboration is an important element in the evolution of community associations, and it tends to be emphasized by some of the prominent funder-driven community-building initiatives. However, in the zealous pursuit of collaboration, funders risk losing sight of larger issues such as organizational capacity, community politics, and institutional relationships. A strong partnership must have a compelling and clear purpose, based on self-interest, to sustain it through the difficult work of building and implementing initiatives. At the community level, collaboration is a vehicle, not an end. According to Sociology expert, "Collaboration among Leaders, residents, and other community institutions tends to be messy: complex and time consuming and not conducive to neat, predetermined funder time constraints or traditional

definitions of results. A number of important national and regional initiatives have all had to add time to the project due largely to the underestimation of the time it would take for effective collaborations to be formed and functioning." Funders and Leaders boards have much work to do to sort out the myriad objectives behind the "collaboration" mantra, to ensure that these partnerships are built for the right reasons.

THE FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The future work of community builders must be focused on doing a few things well.

To Develop Core Capacities in Organizing and Planning

There remain too few opportunities for those in the field, particularly young people to access quality training and support in the basic tools of community organizing and community planning, such as community analysis and assessment, one-on-ones, small group facilitation, coalition building, and so on. Unfortunately, much of the organizing training available is either steeped in dogma or directly connected to specific models of organizing. Organizing chauvinism and the myth of pure or "real" organizing has not served our movement well. Not every organizer will be or needs to be another WARRIOR CHARACTER . Organizing has to be seen less as a sacred noble profession and more as a set of skills that can be learned and practiced by all kinds of people, in a variety of organizational settings. Specifically, we need to touch the heart of peoples:

Increase support for training and recruitment of young community organizers, who can be trained thoroughly in the art/science of community building styles of organizing and community planning.

Expose executive directors and key board personnel, whose organizations are participating in community-building efforts, to new organizing approaches such as Consensus Organizing. They should also be trained in, or at least become acquainted with, the variety of neighborhood planning models that can be applied in various situations.

Break down the chauvinism in the field between product and process people. We need to elevate community organizers and planners to senior positions in Leadership and move them toward a pay scale that is equivalent to the technical staff.

Engage urban planning networks in new discussions about grassroots community planning techniques being practiced by community building groups.

Organize forums among practitioners and activists to take more control over defining this work and developing pragmatic measures of success and standards of practice that will elevate the common denominator in the field.

To Build Organizational Strength

One wouldn't build a skyscraper on a foundation of sticks and mud. Yet, there is some danger of this happening in the community-building movement. The foundation of this entire movement is the PHILSOCORDS and its ability to play an effective role both representing and serving its community. Yet there remains comparably little investment in core operating support and helping to retool Leaders so they can develop the new capacities needed to do this work

effectively. Organizational development resources and technical assistance need to be a sizable component of any community building initiative.

The Promising Community Builders

Community building is helping to refocus our movement on the full range of changes needed to renew community and rebuild poor neighborhoods. It represents a more honest view of the complexity and richness of the struggle.

The promise of community building will not fully reveal itself in the years, given years, or even after wards years. It may require at least a generation of sustained support, dialogue, and major investment in evaluation and peer learning in order to mine from this work the new paradigms that will guide the progres Philippines community life in the next century.

PHILSOCORDS Builders Formation-United Group of Sponsors – The Leaders & Volunteers for fields.

Local & National Technical leaders, Youth & out of school youth, Educators & Financial supporters.