ABSTRACT
Community-based programs providing services to any client group, and especially to those with social stigma, are placed in an ironic situation: while they are often needed, they are also perceived to be threatening to their host communities. Because many service providing agencies with community-based programs have their funding determined by extra-community sources (state bureaucracies, for example), and because the agencies have rarely been invited into communities, or where invited in, rarely asked to locate where they have by the immediate neighbors, community members, who do not utilize the services offered, frequently feel antagonism toward the agency. When there is a high degree of stigma attached to the clients served, the antagonism frequently rises because community members feel that the agency has brought undesirable characters into town or into the neighborhood. Whether the community’s anger is directed towards the clients, the funding agency or the operating agency, the anger felt (but rarely openly expressed) reflects feelings of being out of control of one’s immediate environment. Concerns about property values skyrocket as if price and market were determined locally. The operating agency and its clients are held accountable for falling housing markets and perceived, but not recorded, drops in real estate prices.
