ABSTRACT
While the term community building has traveled a bit across borders, it is especially popular in the U.S. and often includes at least an implicit critique of more traditional, expert-dominated, “top-down” approaches to meeting human services, health, education, housing, and other needs in cities, suburbs, and rural communities. In particular, community building became, in the 1990s, a way of distinguishing creative action, primarily at the local level, to better engage the citizenclients affected by service delivery in key decisions and in the delivery itself and to create lasting connections (community) with a “capacity” value lasting beyond the immediate program or project. But community
builders face important dilemmas and barriers, some of which reflect age-old lessons about getting things done in changing democratic societies, most of all those wherein decision-making power and capacity to implement are decentralized and fragmented. For these reasons, I begin with a look at when and why community building emerged.
