ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on community building as the foundation for community-empowered change, with the key question being, how can this happen? How can communities effectively organize and assert themselves to affect positive results for their children, their families, and their neighborhoods? To address this question, we propose a framework that we believe will make community building more concrete and comprehensible as an approach to resident-driven community improvement. The framework is put forward in a “generic” form. The processes it outlines can be applied across a variety of community concerns, be they matters of safety, housing, policing, or traffic patterns.
