RURAL COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT
AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION
INTRODUCTION: “WHERE
ARE WE GOING?”
The process of building community consensus is sometimes easy when the
issues are carefully framed and the alternatives and their consequences receive
full public debate. However, when
it comes to building a shared vision of a preferred future, the task is
daunting. Over a five-year period,
the communities which make up Mount Desert Island in Maine have been led through
a consensus building process. A
citizens group took up the challenge when the community newspaper surveyed an
array of intractable problems brought on by growth and development and asked,
“Where are we going?”
What emerged in response to that question was a community development
process leading to consensus. An
Extension educator attempted to guide local volunteers and build capacity for
the community to address issues, solve problems, increase participation, and
build leadership, as well as to articulate a shared vision about a preferred
future. Participants and the
Extension educator may have felt, at times, that the process was guided less by
theory than by circumstance and opportunity.
However, there are credible foundations for the process of community
development that was employed. This
chapter examines the consensus building process in Mount Desert Island.
FOUNDATIONS
The word “communities” is employed as a way of talking about
relationships between people and place, and the shared interests and the
conflicts which connect people. Communities
refer not only to places with geography and history, but also to a connectedness
of interests.
In addition, communities are organizations; either well or loosely
defined. Various processes are at
work at all times which maintain, build, or erode the community.
These processes can be understood and influenced by the people who make
up the community.
Community development is a way of learning about community processes and
organizing collective action to influence the processes which maintain, build,
or erode connectedness for the benefit of the members of that community.
VALUES AND ACTION
At some level, the community of interests shares common values.
Values are deeply held beliefs which provide a more or less consistent
influence on the way we live and act.
The practice of community development itself is based on values.
For instance, most practitioners believe that people are capable of
collective action that improves economic, social, and environmental conditions.
Improvement implies change, and so a corollary value for community
development is that change is best managed or directed when the people affected
have influence on the process of change.
The goal which arises from these values might be stated as the creation
of healthy communities. These
include effective organizations for meeting current and anticipated needs of
citizens and a set of ongoing processes through which citizens are better able
to design their future and direct change (Lackey et al. 1987; Wade 1989).
THE CHANGE AGENT
The values which influence the practice of community development provide
an approach to the role of the practitioner, who can be said to be an agent of
change. In this case, the change
agent is essentially an educator using skills and knowledge to establish a
climate in which learning can take place. In
this context, the learning leads to action which is determined by the learners,
as they learn about themselves as a community and about issues and options.
Learners from within the community will move, with the help of the change
agent, to a place where they can make decisions about community direction and
about desired outcomes through appropriate methods and means.
The change agent who practices this form of community development often
attends more to the processes than to the outcome by:
Listening to people, helping them evolve frameworks through which they can hear themselves and each other, and offering frameworks in which they can enact physical projects, time limited and measurable, which they enjoy doing and in which they take pride (Ingram 1990).
There are other familiar roles within the field of community development.
Some of the roles arise directly from a base of knowledge; planner,
expert, consultant. Other roles
arise from an understanding of community process and the distribution of power
and resources: activist, advocate, and organizer.
EDUCATORS, NOT ACTIVISTS
Writing in mid-career, an early practitioner of community development
education, Austin E. Bennett, wrote that the work of the change agent as
educator differed from social action and problem solving models “by injecting
values of democratic action and of collaborative strategies” (Bennett 1969).
The notion of change agent as an educator has gained new currency in the
United States, as some observers noted that reliance on outside resources
fostered dependency. Practitioners
began to experiment with building capacity within communities to manage change.
Indeed, the earliest advocates and designers of the Cooperative Extension
system in the United States viewed the locally based extension agents as
educators whose role was to play a part in every social and economic movement
which sought to develop rural America at the turn of the century (Sanderson et
al. 1988).
The extension system in the United States was envisioned as a partnership
of the federal government, the state university, and local communities.
It made use of a model of social change and the transfer of technology
which led agents to work first with those who were natural leaders and risk
takers in the community.
OTHER ROOTS AND BRANCHES
Recognizing that the way communities responded to change was related to a
number of social systems and institutions, early sociologists and political
scientists added additional theoretical bases to community development, with
branches into early social work and reform movements.
Economists after Keynes began to provide theoretical tools for government
involvement in economic development. The study of group process, much of it stemming from early
work at the Tavistock Institute in England and the work of Kurt Lewin and Carl
Rogers in the United States, gave a new range of skills, emerging most
coherently in a field of consulting called organization development.
The contemporary change agent is able to draw on any of these traditions,
in combinations suited to circumstance and with an eye on the larger goal of
building a healthy community.
BUILDING COMMUNITY
A healthy community has a number of attributes which are related to the
values and practice of community development (Lackey et al. 1987; Wade 1989):
§
Community
attitudes and values are the basis for the work of the community.
§
There is
a resident capacity to identify and solve problems and meet the needs of
community members.
§
The
organizational structure of the community encourages participation of all of its
members.
§
The
community has the means to build, maintain, and renew leadership.
§
Community
members have the means to build consensus and articulate a shared vision about a
preferred future.
The
change agent may begin the practice of community development in a number of
ways. Where the community already
possesses some of the attributes of a healthy community, it may be possible to
develop a contract as the basis for proceeding.
This would involve diagnosing problems, setting realistic boundaries on
time and scope of the work, agreeing on specific tasks and expectations about
performance of both the change agent and the members of the community, and
designing a process for proceeding. In
this way, the community is an organization and the work of the change agent is
set out in the way a contract might set out the work of a consultant.
In many other cases the community is
not cohesive or organized to the point where it can offer a contract.
The work of the change agent is first to build the capacity of the
community to engage in such a relationship.
There are few examples, however, where a change agent is employed by
others to build community capacity alone. Examples
seem to exist in the regional parks in France, or in the notion of extension
agents of the state supported university systems of the United States and
Canada.
These latter approaches recognize a
duality of interests in the mission and goals of the employing organization and
the goal of creating community capacity. Examples
of this community development approach are found in the Healthy Cities Project
in Glasgow and elsewhere in the European Economic Community as well as the
Planned Approach to Community Health established by the United States Centers
for Disease Control, both using community health promotion methods established
by the World Health Organization.
COMMUNITY
CONSENSUS:
A
CASE STUDY ON MOUNT DESERT ISLAND
Description
of Community
Mount Desert Island, about two-thirds
of the way up the coast of Maine towards maritime Canada, is home to some ten
thousand residents in four towns: Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor,
and Tremont. Since the late
1800’s, this island has been the summer refuge for well-to-do families from
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and, beginning in the 1950’s has been the
destination for seasonal visitors, now numbering between four and six million
annually. Acadia National Park,
created by gifts of land from the early summer residents, has preserved sections
of rocky shore, spruce forest, and granite domed mountains and serves as magnet
for a tourism industry that brings $50 million dollars in sales annually to the
island economy (Stellpflug and Dell 1989).
The history of the island and the preservation of nearly one third of the
land as a national park account for other aspects of the economy which include a
strong boat building industry, fishing interests, and a scientific and
educational community which employs 15-20 percent of the year-round labor force.
Scenery and economy and the character of small rural towns have in the last two decades attracted problems inherent in growth and development, and not all residents are happy with the changes and complexities which seem to outstrip the capacity of the communities to plan.
ENTRY
INTO THE SYSTEM
During the summer of 1987, the
island’s only weekly newspaper, The Bar
Harbor Times, ran an in-depth series of articles on the impacts of growth
and development, profiling the changes in the lives of people and their
communities. While each town experienced change in different ways, readers
were struck by the common benchmarks on change.
§
traffic
congestion;
§
threats
to neighborhood character;
§
escalation
of housing costs; and
§
competition
for scarce shorefront among traditional industries, residential interests, and
recreational boating.
At
the end of the series, The Bar Harbor
Times joined with College of the Atlantic, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, and
the League of Women Voters to host a community forum on growth and development. Over two hundred people heard from and reacted to an array of
panelists who described issues and trends and impacts.
In
the editorial following the community forum, The
Bar Harbor Times asked for response to the question, “What does the island
do next?” Behind the scenes, the
publisher of the newspaper approached the League of Towns, an organization
consisting of the town managers of each of the four towns, and the
superintendent of Acadia National Park with this question.
Since its formation in 1975, the League had engaged primarily in problem
solving around the issue of solid waste management, but its members declined to
tackle the more amorphous issues surrounding growth and development.
The
publisher sought advice from the executive director of Maine Coast Heritage
Trust, a non-profit land conservation organization.
Having worked with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension faculty
on a number of projects, the director of the Trust recommended contacting the
Cooperative Extension at both the administrative and county levels to seek
assistance. The newspaper and the
Trust were joined in that request by the League of Women Voters, which had
conducted a useful but largely anecdotal review of the cumulative impacts of
growth and development, and College of the Atlantic, all of which had been
co-sponsors of the community forum.
The
local Extension educator became the consultant in this community development
process. The key staff of each of
the organizations requesting the assistance were visited to gain insight into
motives and sense of direction. Because
of long term residence on Mount Desert Island, the consultant had a good deal of
objective and intuitive data about the nature and scope of the issues and had
knowledge of the governance, power structure, and relationships among the
initiating organizations and others in the four towns of Mount Desert Island.
After
individual meetings, the Extension educator organized a meeting with key staff
of all initiating organizations, seeking involvement at this time of an
Extension specialist to attend and serve in two roles:
first, as a legitimating influence to the process of community
development from the University; and second, as a process observer and
consultant to the Extension educator.
QUESTIONS OF LEGITIMACY
After reviewing a model of standard community development process, the
group raised an important consideration. As
representatives of organizations of a common mind about the impacts of growth
and development and, more importantly, as folks
from away (that is, not native to
Mount Desert Island), they were sensitive to their own legitimacy for moving the
island community through this process. Were
there ways to involve people and groups of different views, and would the
process work if natives were not part
of the initiating force?
At a subsequent meeting the group decided to seek membership to a more
broadly based steering committee and used a matrix of geography and interests
such as business and environmental concerns, educational and social services
institutions, government, and other categories. Names were suggested for each matrix cell and balanced for
other characteristics: male and female, younger and older, retired and working,
native and newcomer. Without asking
them for a long-term commitment, some twenty individuals were contacted and
asked to attend a meeting to explore perceptions about the future of Mount
Desert Island and possibilities for community involvement. In this case, the letterhead of University of Maine
Cooperative Extension served as a legitimizing factor for invitations.
VALUES, PURPOSE, METHODS….
An opening exercise at that meeting, facilitated by the Extension
educator, engaged participants in their earliest memories of Mount Desert Island
as well as trying to put into words or images what they would hope the future of
the island might hold. The group,
which now included representatives of the initiating organizations and invitees,
agreed to meet again to talk about purpose and methods. About twenty people met two weeks later to agree on a purpose
and a name. A loose structure was
suggested and the group became a steering committee, with staff and logistical
support from the county extension office.
The steering committee chose a name, Mount
Desert Island Tomorrow: A Citizens’ Forum on the Island’s Future (MDI
Tomorrow), and defined a statement of purpose:
To help MDI citizens and
communities manage cumulative, island-wide impacts of growth, identify and build
consensus about the island’s future, and cooperatively guide development so as
to protect and improve environmental, economic, and social conditions.
These were conscious attempts to project
inclusive, non-adversarial dialogue. An
array of possible methods to carry out the purpose was also suggested:
§
educational
meetings;
§
research
into the impacts of development or collecting baseline information;
§
referral
and networking of problems and solutions; and
§
dissemination
of information.
…. AND ROLES
At this point, it would have been appropriate to address longer-term
structure and leadership within the group.
The group chose to avoid these aspects of organization in favor of moving
into an initial task. The Extension
educator, lacking a clear contract with people who were only becoming a group,
was cast in the role of leader and facilitator, which became increasingly
blurred and confusing, as time went on.
COMMUNITY INTERVIEWS
The steering committee decided that the first task was to define the key
issues facing the communities of Mount Desert Island, beginning with the
background work by The Bar Harbor Times.
The group decided to interview knowledgeable town leaders, business
people, and citizens. Using the
same matrix process the group identified thirty key respondents.
The Extension educator helped design an interview process, and the
Extension office served as a manager of funds collected for hiring a summer
intern from College of the Atlantic to help conduct and summarize the
interviews.
Five steering committee members and the intern met to agree on interview
formats and to divide up the assignments. By
the end of the summer of 1988, after interviews had been conducted and
transcribed, other members of the steering committee served as an editorial
review committee, working with the intern to provide a written summary.
Six interrelated issues were highlighted and discussed, using
illustrative quotes from interviewees, identified not by name but by role.
The issues were:
§
sewage
and solid waste disposal;
§
quality
and supply of drinking water;
§
protection
of open space and agricultural land;
§
traditional
access to the shore and uplands;
§
housing,
land costs, and the property tax structure; and
§
traffic
and transportation.
Two
themes seemed to emerge. First,
people felt that the scope and pace of change was rendering people powerless to
direct change. Secondly, people
felt that Mount Desert Island must be approaching a summertime carrying
capacity, beyond which the quality of life for residents and of the vacation
experience for the visitor was sure to diminish.
The Bar Harbor Times published the summary in a six part series in
the late fall of 1988.
MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER PART OF TOWN….
External events added momentum and urgency to the process when, in the
spring of 1988, the Maine State Legislature passed a law requiring towns to
address growth, development, environmental concerns, and affordable housing
through comprehensive planning. While
none of the towns on Mount Desert Island were targeted to receive financial
assistance in the first round of planning grants, officials in each town
recognized the opportunity to begin the process and had made initial steps to
organize for the work. Bar
Harbor’s comprehensive planning committee, in fact, had conducted a public
opinion survey and planned to use neighborhood meetings organized by MDI
Tomorrow to focus in on issues which emerged from analysis of that town’s
survey results.
In addition, Acadia National Park, after years of national and local
debate, had established permanent boundaries and was engaged in clarifying
policy direction and resource protection goals in its own planning process to
create a general management plan. Using
collaborative models to involve the surrounding towns and citizens with local
and national perspectives, park staff were actively supporting individual town
planning efforts as well as the process of community development initiated by
MDI Tomorrow.
NEIGHBORHOOD MEETINGS: TOWARDS A TENTATIVE CONSENSUS
In the absence of a clearly defined structure to town government, and
with blurred roles of consultant and leader on the part of the Extension
educator, the steering committee continued to wrestle with questions of legitimacy in the desire to build consensus.
Though the key respondents had outlined the issues, how did others, at a
more grassroots level, respond to growth and development pressures?
Drawing on a model of public discussion used in local contexts by the
Domestic Policy Association and the Kettering Foundation in National Issues
Forums (Mathews 1988), the Extension educator helped the steering committee
organize a series of fifteen neighborhood meetings, each with a community host
and trained volunteer facilitators and recorders.
A University of Maine graduate student, hired for a practicum experience
in a joint agreement by the National Park Service and Cooperative Extension,
summarized the results of the neighborhood meetings, and had served as either
facilitator or recorder at several.
That summary, along with the original interviews with key respondents,
provided the steering committee with a sense that they could begin to see some
common elements in respondents’ visions for the future of Mount Desert Island.
What emerged, in the late spring of 1989, was the desire to share those
common elements in ways that were useful to policy makers and decision makers in
the public and private sectors. Acknowledging
the comprehensive planning processes underway in each town, a small working
group, including the Extension educator, drafted a series of statements in each
of fourteen topic areas required of towns in the comprehensive planning law and
shared these as a draft preferred future for Mount Desert Island.
At a meeting of the steering committee to which members of the public
(including a growing list of people requesting MDI Tomorrow informational
mailings) had been invited, the preferred future statements were presented for
discussion. The discussion
underscored confusion between preferred future, as a vision of where people want
to go, and projections about where people think the island would go, given
current trends. The working group
was charged with redrafting the document into a Futures
Sourcebook and Workbook.
Included in the Sourcebook
section were an outline of purpose and process, an informational profile on
Mount Desert Island and its towns, and projections based on current trends.
The Workbook section offered a
series of statements reflecting the preferred future for Mount Desert Island,
with questions and space to record reactions, alternate views, and comments.
These were noted as drafts and widely circulated to a rapidly growing
mailing list of people attending various meetings, town officials, and others
who had read ongoing news articles and had requested information.
All who were given copies of the drafts were asked to send them back with
comments.
The drafts were met with mild interest, but the steering committee
decided to take a more proactive approach, calling a number of citizens and
leaders and arranging for interviews about the Sourcebook/Workbook.
The comments of both interviewees and other respondents were incorporated
in a second draft, which was circulated in much the same manner.
ADDING ECONOMIC DATA
The steering committee also initiated and supported further research and
data gathering, some of which came in the form of a master’s thesis describing
the economic base of Mount Desert Island by the same graduate student employed
earlier to work with the results of the neighborhood meetings.
This work analyzed recent taxable sales data and employment on Mount
Desert Island, providing the first comprehensive picture of the local economy
since 1972 (Stellpflug and Deller 1989).
MDI Tomorrow, with financial support from the National Park Service and
Cooperative Extension, oversaw completion of this project and printed a summary
for distribution to members of the League of Towns and others.
This material was incorporated in the Sourcebook, along with data on
housing which had been developed for discussion by government and business
leaders in the summer of 1989.
OPINION POLL SUPPORTS EMERGING CONSENSUS
The slow, rather imprecise process of building an island-wide consensus
was not without mild criticism by those who desired a more scientific approach
to outlining public opinion. In the
fall of 1989, the editor of The Bar Harbor
Times solicited intellectual and financial backing to commission a Harris
Poll on the future of Mount Desert Island.
Based on a similar survey of views on Martha’s Vineyard in
Massachusetts, the Harris Poll would provide percentages and crosstabulations of
responses to key questions and concerns. The
statistically valid views of both year round and summer residents would be
sought and compared.
The steering committee of MDI Tomorrow encouraged the project, seeing
that it would either confirm or contrast with the preferred future emerging in
the workbook. Louis Harris
Associated conducted the poll in the late spring of 1990 and The Bar Harbor Times published “Island At A Crossroad”, the
results of the survey, in August. Many
of the pollster’s questions emerged directly from the earlier drafts of the
workbook and summaries of citizen concerns about growth and development.
The results stated generally that there was overall satisfaction about
the present quality of life on the island but fear that overdevelopment would
cause an erosion of that quality. As
well, the results supported nearly every aspect of the preferred future which
had been outlined in the workbook.
GAINING
WIDER CIRCULATION
Up to that point, the various drafts of the Sourcebook/Workbook had
served to focus public discussion on the issues and the possibility of
articulating a consensus view about the preferred future of Mount Desert Island.
Presentations to Rotary, Lions, Chambers of Commerce, Comprehensive
Planning Committees, elected officials, individual business leaders, and others
served to describe the current draft and to elicit individual and group views,
criticism and comment.
However, the steering committee was not convinced that the consensus
views presented were circulated widely enough to promote serious consideration
in the public and private planning process that would determine, in large part,
the future of the island. In the
fall of 1990, the group sought, and was awarded, a grant from the World Wildlife
Fund Innovative Communities Program to edit and publish
“Sourcebook/Workbook” as a supplement to The
Bar Harbor Times. “MDI
Tomorrow: A Look At the Future of Mount Desert Island” was published
in May of 1991. This sixteen
page document provided a more easily understood and graphically attractive
profile of current conditions, a future based on current trends, and the
preferred future summarized from the consensus building process.
The supplement presented an overview of the Harris Poll and how public
opinion, in fact, supported most aspects of the preferred future identified by
MDI Tomorrow. And it made use of
rapidly growing capacities of College of the Atlantic and Acadia National Park
computerized geographic information systems to generate a build out study for the island, for the first time presenting visual
detail of the cumulative impact of current zoning in each of the island towns.
The build out revealed that “in the fullness of time” and based on
current zoning and environmental factors, there were an additional 13,200 house
lots possible on Mount Desert Island, on top of the existing 8,200 lots.
Finally, the supplement included four opinion pieces by business and
government leaders, commenting on the process and consensus identified by MDI
Tomorrow. One wrote:
It
is ironic that those who seek to preserve the status quo are, by their
obstructionist attitudes, guaranteeing that change will be uncontrolled and
random rather that planned. We can
ride the back of the tiger for a while, but what happens when we inevitably
dismount?
And
a business woman commented that the leaders
Who implement (the ideas presented in this report) must be very certain that they are acting for the benefit of the individual as well as for the separate communities and the Island as a whole (MDI Tomorrow 1991).
RESULTS:
A PROGRESS REPORT
As a citizen's forum on the future of the island, MDI Tomorrow has a
credible track record in helping identify and build the consensus outlined in
the Preferred Future section of its workbook.
Two other aspects of the organization's stated purpose are less directly
measured: helping citizens and communities manage cumulative island-wide impacts
of growth, and guiding development so as to protect and improve environmental,
economic, and social conditions. It may be that these elements of the original purpose will be
better carried by other informal and formal processes and organizations.
For instance, a number of related accomplishments are indirectly tied to
the overall MDI Tomorrow process, through members
of the steering committee and related work by the Extension educator:
·
A
business-government working group associated with the League of towns
established task forces on affordable housing and tourism management.
Recommendations were presented in the spring of 1990, and the group
followed up with a conference in the fall of 1991.
The group has helped think through public-private partnerships to develop
a sustainable economy and island-wide cooperation on public welfare in the face
of shrinking state dollars.
·
An
island-wide coalition of planners was established by both volunteers and
professionals involved in their town's comprehensive planning.
The group established an agenda of educational sessions, drawing on the
resources of the regional planning commission, the College of the Atlantic, and
Acadia National Park. This group
served as a steering committee for a regional planning studio involving graduate
students through which planning case studies were developed for representative
problems in each of the towns, with alternative solutions presented in a public
forum and in a summary document.
·
Compatible
goal and policy statements have emerged (as have actions in a variety of other
private and community processes), notably: The adoption of draft goals in the
comprehensive plan for Bar Harbor; the development of affordable housing options
by three private, nonprofit groups; and the attempts by chambers of commerce to
attract visitors in the spring and fall shoulder seasons and to market visitor
services to those who might stay longer and spend more.
Throughout
its work, MDI Tomorrow has served as a networking force, referring issues and
opportunities to other groups for study and action, bringing people and ideas
together, empowering individuals to play roles in other organizations.
It has suggested new techniques for citizen involvement, and has
supported citizens who want to study and understand the interrelationship of
issues in their community.
HAS MDI TOMORROW BECOME A COMMUNITY
INSTITUTION?
To the frustration of some, the MDI Tomorrow process has not created what consultants in organizational development might call 'a bounded system', with a clearly defined product, unless one counts the recent publication of the newspaper supplement. It has not created an internal structure which will insure its own survival. It does not have a high degree of accountability, even though meetings of the steering committee often touch on the issue of legitimacy of the group and the processes it engages. It has not amassed resources which can be quickly allocated towards specific objectives, but it has been able to coopt the resources of other organizations for shared objectives. Finally, it has not dealt clearly with issues of leadership. The boundaries of the Extension educator roles have blurred, at once a community development educator, a consultant (external to the organization or the process), yet enmeshed in the overall process along with the active members of the steering committee.
But leadership has emerged when called for.
During the last major project, a member of the steering committee
initiated the funding request to edit and publish the newspaper supplement.
Other members have taken on clearly defined responsibilities within this
and other projects. A small working
group reported regularly to the larger steering committee through regular
mailings and is conversations to key community leaders, but there were no full
steering committee meetings held in the ten months preceding publication.
The working group will have to return to the steering committee before
further actions are considered and will have to assess the desirability of
continuing as an organization. Should
the steering committee decide to continue, the Extension educator will have an
opportunity to clarify roles and responsibilities within negotiation of a
renewed contract.
EVALUATION
MDI Tomorrow has not, as yet, subjected itself to formal evaluation.
As indicated above, it can point to specific accomplishments which
suggest a logical community development process. Indeed, MDI Tomorrow can be characterized as a process
through which the community develops capacity.
Returning to the attributes of a healthy community there are indicators,
even if subjective, that show the communities on Mount Desert Island tending
towards the healthy end of a spectrum. Without
claiming a causal relationship between the work of MDI Tomorrow and a current
diagnosis of health, there are several observations, some of which might
be examined in greater detail in a more structured evaluation:
·
Community
attitudes and values are the basis for the work of the community. MDI
Tomorrow spent a good deal of its early life talking with people about their
attitudes and concerns about growth and development. These attitudes were brought into sharper focus through the
Harris Poll. During in-depth
interviews and neighborhood meetings, people were asked what they valued about
life in their community. These
values and attitudes from the basis for the preferred future offered as an
island wide consensus by MDI Tomorrow, and they appear to be the basis for
policy now being formed in the public and private sectors.
·
There
is a resident capacity to identify and solve problems and meet the needs of
community members. Collaboration among the League of Towns, MDI
Tomorrow, the business-government working group, and others led to informative
discussions about the issue of affordable housing. Employees, town planners, bankers, builders, and developers
offered knowledge about the existing situation and explored a range of
alternative approaches which are slowly being adopted in order to increase
affordable housing available to year round lower and middle-income residents and
seasonal workers. This process is
akin to action research described within the field of community and organization
development, where the community/organization members decide what issues to
research as a basis for future action.
·
The
organizational structure of the community encourages participation of all of its
members. Many local officials and residents feel both the
blessing and the curse of the town meeting form of government.
In the face of perceived reductions in attendance at formal meetings,
there is a growing awareness that public participation is not guaranteed by
requirements to hold public hearings. In
fact, there have been a number of innovative attempts to build on techniques
demonstrated by MDI Tomorrow to increase or improve public involvement:
neighborhood meetings, coalition building, the use of group and meeting
facilitators, the use of newspaper supplements to raise issues and alternative
solutions to the public agenda, and using the resources of local institutions to
highlight issues and problems.
·
The
community has the means to build, maintain, and renew leadership.
There
appears to be an active interest in the question of leadership.
The results of the 1990 Harris Poll show respondents challenging the
adequacy of leadership that merely preserves the status quo.
In addition, most local elections also involve contested seats.
A review of the characteristics of those in leadership positions, either
in the private or public sectors reveals a surprising number of representatives
of the baby boom generation. What
appears lacking is a balance between natives and newcomers, with the latter
holding a greater proportion of positions.
·
Community
members have the means to build consensus and articulate a shared vision about a
preferred future. MDI
Tomorrow has demonstrated such a means for the four communities which make up
the Mount Desert Island. It is too
early to declare the process complete, for the current draft of consensus has
just been distributed to the 8500 subscribers of The
Bar Harbor Times and may provoke reactions which nudge the preferred future
in one direction or another. It
remains to be seen whether presented for the first time with a comprehensive,
island-wide vision, leaders of public and private sectors will be able to
fashion policy to move things towards that shared vision.
CONCLUSION
Communities are connectedness, relationships of people and place.
MDI Tomorrow chose a process to build consensus about the nature of that
connectedness and a preferred future. That
process may not be wholly transferable to other locations, but the ideas and
methods are adaptable, and attention to the values of community development
education will sustain the practitioner even if false starts or detours become
apparent.
In any case, it is not so much the path but what happens along the way.
In one view, results of community consensus building may be obvious only
to the historian, as public and personal decisions move towards or away from
statements on the written page. Seen
in a larger context, consensus building is not only about the present issues,
but also about the capacity of the community to identify and solve problems.
It is a way to articulate values that guide community action.
It is a means of encouraging participation.
If community leadership is sometimes like the muscle that requires
exercise, then consensus building also provides opportunities to build and renew
leadership in a democracy.
Indeed, it may be that consensus building and community are linked in the
fashion of the mobius strip. A
mobius strip is sometimes used to demonstrate illusion.
The illusionist shows an audience a strip of material, which appears to
have two distinct sides; the strip is twisted and connected, end to end.
Now, as the loop is traced, the distinction of sides disappears.
Until the loop is broken, there is but one side.
So it would seem, in the practice of community development. The practitioner makes the connection, and consensus building
and community building become both the means and the end, the distinctions of
which seem to disappear.
REFERENCES
Bennett,
A. 1969 (republished 1986).
Reflections on Community
Ingram,
C. 1990. In the Footsteps of Gandhi. Berkeley,
California: Berkeley,
California: The Parallax Press.
Island
at a Crossroads. August 30, 1990. The
Bar Harbor Times.
Lackey,
A., et al. 1987. Healthy Communities: The
Goal of Community
Development. Journal
of the Community
Development
Society. 18 (2):
1-17.Mathews, D.
1988. The Promise of Democracy.
Dayton, Ohio:
Kettering
Foundation.
MDI
Tomorrow: A Look at the Future of
Mount Desert Island. May 30, 1991.
The Bar Harbor Times.
Sanderson,
D. et al. 1988. Understanding Cooperative Extension: Our Origins, Our Opportunities. Raleigh, North Carolina:
North
Carolina
State University.
Stellpflug,
T., and S. Deller. 1989.
The Economic Base of Mount Desert Island. 1989.
University of Maine, Department of
Agriculture and Resource Economics.
Wade,
J. 1989. Felt Needs and Anticipatory Needs:
Reformation of a
Basic Community Development Principle.
Journal of the Community
Development Society. 20 (1):
116-123.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ronald
Beard is an Extension Educator in the University of Maine Cooperative Extension,
Hancock County Extension Office, Ellsworth, Maine.
Community-Based
Approaches to Rural Development: Principles
and Practices
Copyright
©
Rural and Small Town Research and Studies Programme
Department of Geography
Mount Allison University
Sackville, New Brunswick
ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
Canadian
Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main
entry under title:
Community-Based
Approaches to Rural Development: Principles
and Practices
Papers
presented at a conference held June 23-26, 1991, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward
Island.
Includes
Bibliographical References and Index
ISBN
0-88828-112-9
1.
Rural development – Congresses. I.
Bruce, David, 1967 –
II. Whitla, Margaret, 1940 -. III. Mount Allison University.
Rural
and Small Town Research and Studies Programme.
HN49.C6A47
307.1’412 C93-090553-9
This
publication was partially funded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation,
but the views expressed are the personal views of the authors and the
Corporation accepts no responsibility for them.
Designed
in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Printed
by alphaAGraphique, Montreal, Quebec.
This
book is printed on recycled paper.
FOREWORD……………………………………………...V
SETTING
THE STAGE: GUIDEPOSTS FOR SUCCESSFUL COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT……………...1
PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESSFUL COMMUNITY
DEVELOPMENT………………………….……...3
Stephen Lauer
SMALL TOWN REVITALIZATION THROUGH THE
MAIN STREET APPROACH………………………9
Matt Hussmann
HERITAGE: A
CATALYST FOR INNOVATIVE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT………………..………21
Cynthia L. Stacey and Roger D. Needham
‘GENIUS LOCI’:
A CATALYST FOR PLANNING
STRATEGIES FOR SMALL RURAL COMMUNITIES.45
Michael Fagence
WE
CAN DO IT: STRATEGIES FOR
ENHANCING
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT………...............................................................................….69
INNOVATION SUPPORT SERVICES FOR
INNOVATIVE COMMUNITIES………………………71
Charles H. Davis
RURAL COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT AND
AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION……………………...95
Ronald E. Beard
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: SETTING
A
NEW COURSE FOR RURAL AREAS……………….115
Brett P. McGillivray
WHERE WE USED TO HUNT BEAR, THERE ARE
NOW HOUSES………………………………………...123
Debra A. Mason
INNOVATION IN RURAL COMMUNITIES:
A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE ENGLISH VOLUNTARY
SECTOR………………………………………………..131
Alan Rogers