The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families

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Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCIs) are neighborhood-based efforts that seek improved outcomes for individuals and families as well as improvements in neighborhood conditions by working comprehensively across social, economic and physical sectors. Additionally, CCIs operate on the principle that community building -- that is, strengthening institutional capacity at the neighborhood level, enhancing social capital and personal networks, and developing leadership -- is a necessary aspect of the process of transforming distressed neighborhoods.

The Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives is a forum in which persons involved with CCIs can meet to discuss challenges, discern lessons, and work on problems that are of common concern. It is Co-chaired by Harold A. Richman, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor of Social Welfare Policy and director of the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, and Lisbeth B. Schorr, director of the Harvard Project on Effective Interventions and author of Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage and Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America. The Roundtable was founded in 1992 under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1994 became a policy program of the Aspen Institute. The Roundtable currently has 33 members including foundation officers, program directors, experts in the field, and public officials. Two federal agencies and ten private foundations fund the activities of the Roundtable.

Roundtable members meet once or twice a year to discuss issues that are at the forefront of the CCI field and to help evolve the Roundtable staff’s work agenda. Meetings generally include both unstructured and structured discussions. In unstructured discussions, members provide updates to the group on their initiatives and new developments in the field. In structured discussions, outside experts, staff, or sub-committee working group members make formal presentations to the group on commissioned topics. Examples of the issues addressed in structured discussions have included:

• Goverance structures in CCIs;

• Clarifying core constructs in the field, for example, how concepts like community building, leadership, and capacity building are operationalized within a CCI context;

• Alternative approaches to evaluating CCIs;

• The "infrastructure" of technical, financial, policy and other resources that support the CCI field; and

• The role of race in the context of CCIs.

While the mission of the Roundtable is wide in scope, the activities undertaken by staff reflect a focus on a smaller set of in-depth activities:
 

Voices from the Field: Learning from Comprehensive Community Initiatives

In 1995, the Roundtable sponsored 11 focus group discussions among various participants in CCIs, including foundation representatives, initiative directors and staff, evaluators, members of the governance structures of local initiatives, residents of the neighborhoods in which CCIs are taking place, and other experts and observers of the field. The aim was to elicit the experience and conclusions of actors in the field in order to produce an early analytical portrait of CCIs that could be of use to a number of audiences.

The discussions became the basis of a report entitled, Voices from the Field: Learning from Comprehensive Community Initiatives. The report gives a portrait of CCIs and describes their goals, principles and operational strategies. It also presents the general lessons that are being learned in the field and the dilemmas and challenges that face the various actors involved in CCIs.

Steering Committee on Evaluation

In April 1994, the Evaluation Steering Committee of the Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives was created to help resolve the limitations of traditional evaluation methods for the need to learn from and assess the effectiveness of CCIs. The group’s objective is to bring together information from three perspectives in order to identify new approaches to the evaluation of CCIs: (a) on-the-ground experience designing, implementing and evaluating CCIs; (b) state-of-the-art social science research findings about pathways leading to individual, family and community success and the relationships among them; and (c) theories and methods from the field of evaluation.

In 1995 the Roundtable published, the volume, New Approaches to Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives: Concepts, Methods, and Contexts, edited by James Connell, Anne Kubisch, Lisbeth Schorr and Carol Weiss. The papers in this volume explore key dilemmas in the evaluation of CCIs. Collectively, the papers suggest that CCIs are difficult to evaluate for reasons that relate both to the design of the initiatives themselves and the state of evaluation methods and measures. They also suggest that work can be done on both fronts that will enhance the field’s ability to judge the effectiveness of CCIs and, ultimately, other social welfare interventions.

New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives: Volume 2: Theory, Measurement, and Analysis, edited by Karen Fulbright-Anderson, Anne C. Kubisch, and James P. Connell, was published by the Roundtable in 1998. The book offers a progress report on work accomplished in developing a theory of change approach to CCI evaluation. This volume presents reflections from the growing number of evaluation practitioners using this approach, bringing together the lessons learned from early attempts to apply the theory of change concepts in the field.

Internet-based Resources for Comprehensive Community Initiatives

The Roundtable has developed two Internet-based resources for CCIs. The first, Community Building Resource Exchange (www.commbuild.org), provides a forum for exchanging resources and information by providing links to a wide range of materials covering the theoretical bases and practical applications of comprehensive, community building approaches to neighborhood revitalization. The Roundtable’s own web site (www.aspenroundtable.org) is designed to provide information about our current projects through on-line publications and working papers, as well as our catalogue of measurement instruments related to community research. This feature of the Roundtable site, called Measures for Community Research is one of the first resources of its kind, and will serve as a clearinghouse for the collection and distribution of instruments and other tools related to key community-level outcomes.

Race and Community Revitalization

During 1998, Roundtable members and staff began the work of developing a framework for a new project, Examining Comprehensive Community Revitalization through a Race/Ethnicity Lens. In July practitioners, policy experts, and academics attended a national seminar sponsored by the Roundtable to examine the intersection between structural racism and community revitalization, and to refine our conceptual framework for the project. A broad range of scholars were also convened to prepare critical literature reviews in 22 areas of political, civic, cultural, economic, and social life in America. These reviews, and the conceptual framework for the project, will be published as a volume later in 1999. For further information, contact:

Anne C. Kubisch
Karen Fulbright-Anderson
Co-Directors

Andrea Anderson, Research Associate
Patricia Auspos, Research Associate
Ivett Colon, Office Assistant
Keith Lawrence, Research Associate
Gretchen Susi, Research Assistant

The Aspen Institute
Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives
281 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010
Tel: (212) 677-5510
Fax: (212) 677-5650

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The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives
 

Roundtable Members

Harold Richman (Co-Chair) Faculty Associate Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor The University of Chicago Lisbeth B. Schorr (Co-Chair) Lecturer in Social Medicine Project on Effective Interventions at Harvard University Michael Bailin President Edna McConnell Clark Foundation John Barros Executive Director Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiatives Douglas Besharov Resident Scholar American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Angela Blackwell President and CEO PolicyLink Barbara B. Blum Senior Fellow in Child and Family Policy National Center for Children in Poverty Alvertha Bratton Penny Program Officer William & Flora Hewlett Foundation Xavier de Souza Briggs Associate Professor Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government Paul Jellinek Vice President The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Otis Johnson Dean Savannah State University College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Anne C. Kubisch Co-Director Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives The Aspen Institute Susan Lloyd Director Building Community Capacity John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Gayle McClure Vice President - Programs W.K. Kellogg Foundation Anita Miller Board Member Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program William A. Morrill Senior Fellow Caliber Associates Robert O'Neill, Jr. President National Academy of Public Administration Terry Peterson Senior Fellow for Educational Policy & Partnership Ron Register Consultant

Geoffrey Canada Executive Director Rheedlen Centers for Families and Children Gaetana D. Ebbole Executive Director Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County Peter Edelman Professor of Law Georgetown University Law Center Karen Fulbright-Anderson Co-Director Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives The Aspen Institute Sid Gardner President Children and Family Futures Jim Gibson Senior Policy Advisor/President Emeritus Center for the Study of Social Policy David Harris Director of Florida Philanthropy Community Initiative Program MacArthur Foundation David Hornbeck Consultant Craig Howard Vice President Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation Julius B. Richmond John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy, Emeritus Department of Social Medicine Harvard University Mark Ridley-Thomas City Councilman, Eighth District Los Angeles Charles Royer National Program Director Urban Health Initiative Ann Segal Consultant Ralph Smith Vice President Annie E. Casey Foundation Jeremy Travis Senior Fellow Urban Institute Gary Walker President Pubic/Private Ventures

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