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 The Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California at Santa Cruz recently released Community Building, Community Bridging: Linking Neighborhood Improvement Initiatives and the New Regionalism in the San Francisco Bay Area, which reports on the Center's experience working with three neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area to link local community development strategies with regional dynamics and opportunities. Written by Manuel Pastor, Jr. and colleagues, Community Building, Community Bridging suggests that there is much to be gained from a regional prism on local development but that there are also significant challenges-the approach may stumble as well as succeed in the absence of visionary leadership, community-to-community learning, and a focus on building alliances and changing policy.
The Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community is an applied research center housed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Its faculty, staff, and associated researchers work with an international mix of community activists, affiliated researchers and students. Combining rigor and relevance, the Center conducts serious research to elevate the quality of public debate, timely policy analysis to aid community leaders and decision-makers, and outreach and education to improve public discourse on challenging topics. For more information on the Center, visit the website http://cjtc.ucsc.edu.
Incorporating detailed case studies based on fieldwork in Mayfair (located in East San Jose), parts of East Palo Alto and West Oakland, Community Building, Community Bridging focuses on the notion of community-based regionalism, which is increasingly capturing the attention of academics, activists, policy makers, and grantmaking foundations. Funded primarily by the Hewlett Foundation, this publication seeks to fill the vacuum of baseline examples, case studies, and local experiences with this approach. While focused on the San Francisco Bay region, the report offers lessons of general applicability, including:
- Nurturance of a community-based regional perspective depends on the regional context of neighborhood efforts.
- Internal dynamics of neighborhoods (e.g., social and political cohesion) impact their ability to find common interests in a regional agenda.
- Internal strength and stability, as well as technical capacity of neighborhood organizations to analyze labor markets, offer transportation policy options and leverage alternative financing for affordable housing eases the transition to strategic regional positioning.
- Community-based regionalism is more readily embraced by organizations willing to advocate reform of state and local policies that encourage low-wage economic development.
- Access to outside expertise, technical assistance and funding is crucial to successful regionally oriented neighborhood initiatives.
To download an Adobe Acrobat-compatible copy of the report, direct your browser to http://cjtc.ucsc.edu/communityRegionalism.html (click on the link at the bottom of the three-paragraph description of the project). To obtain a printed version of the report, send an e-mail request to Julie Jacobs at . For more information on the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community, visit the website http://cjtc.ucsc.edu.
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