ABSTRACT
William Lawrence, as the Committee's consultant to some of the cities, was concerned to bring together city hall, the school system, and the private agencies in a coalition of leading institutions. In Cleveland, a struggle between City Hall and the School System eventually destroyed the tenuous consensus on which the project had been founded. The experience of Los Angeles, Cleveland, Chicago and Philadelphia suggests that community action projects, as the Ford Foundation and the President's Committee conceived them, could not after all master the jurisdictional rivalries which pervade city government in America. In practice, institutions remained stubbornly self-interested, and their formal endorsement of the project did not guarantee any commitment to its aims. Cleveland created an incorporated structure comprised of city, county, schools and courts, and community representation. The crucial flaw seems to have lain, not in the financial inducement, but in the insistence on formal co-ordination as a prerequisite, rather than an outcome of changes in the power structure.
