[R]eformers have relied on the idea of community as the vehicle through which they could compensate for and counteract the costs inherent in American social priorities and arrangements. They have believed that local communities can somehow be different in values and dynamics than the larger society in which they are embedded. Thus, for example, it has been presumed that in a society driven by self-interest in would be easiest to identify common interests within a local community. ... In reality, as discussed above, Americans have been far more likely historically to use the idea of community to exclude and divide than to include ...
In a society characterized by social and racial segregation, the people coming together to address poverty and its related problems become the poor and excluded coming together to address these problems. The history of neighborhood initiative reflects a persistent tendency to ask those with the fewest capital, institutional, and human resources to draw on those resources tro better their lives; to ask those whose trust has been betrayed over and over ... to join a process requiring significant trust; and to ask the excluded to be responsible for finding a way to become included.
--Robert Halpern, Rebuilding the Inner City, 1995 (pp. 10 & 12)
In trying to come up with proposals for a more participatory and community-organizing role for parents in a Promise Neighborhood Initiative, more and more I ask myself: Am I more or less optimistic about the abilities of PNIs to fulfill their ambitious missions?
