Kenneth M. Reardon

Enhancing the Capacity of Community-Based Organizations in East St. Louis

This article describes the efforts of students and faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to strengthen the organizing, planning, and development capacity of community-based organizations seeking to enhance the quality of life in East St. Louiss poorest residential neighborhoods. The article demonstrates the effectiveness of the universitys empowerment planning approach to capacity-building that integrates the concepts and methods of participatory action research, direct action organizing, and critical theory into a new paradigm for community planning. The article concludes with a preliminary assessment of the empowerment planning approachs effectiveness in capacity-building in East St. Louis.

Promoting Reciprocity within Community/University Development Partnerships: Lessons from the Field

One of the most powerful trends within contemporary American higher education is the movement towards greater student and faculty involvement in communitybased planning and development efforts in low-income communities. The recent growth in what Ernest Boyer described as the ‘‘scholarship of engagement’’ began in the early 1980s as poverty rates began to rise in many of our central cities in the wake of long-term deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, and disinvestment. The social problems caused by these economic trends were compounded by the devolution of responsibility for many health, education, and welfare programs by the federal government and by significant reductions in intergovernmental transfer payments carried out by the Reagan Administration. University students and faculty aware of the escalating fiscal crisis confronted by local social service agencies as they struggled to assist growing numbers of low-income families, in an increasingly lean funding environment, volunteered to support the direct service and issues advocacy efforts of these organisations. These campus-based community service efforts received a significant boost in 1984 when Wayne Meisel, a Harvard undergraduate who had been volunteering at a Cambridge, MA community center, decided to undertake a ‘Call to Action’ walk. During a 1500-mile trek that began in Maine and ended in Washington, DC, Meisel visited 70 colleges and universities to encourage students to become involved in social justice work in their communities. The Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL), a national student organisation committed to expanding and strengthening the campus-based and student-led community service programs in economically distressed communities, emerged from this effort. In 1985, the presidents of Brown, Georgetown, and Stanford universities came together to lend their support to the growing community service movement taking place on campuses by forming the Campus Compact, a national organisation of college and university presidents dedicated to advancing the civic purposes of higher education

Combating Racism through Planning Education: Lessons from the East St. Louis Action Research Project

(1998). Combating Racism through Planning Education: Lessons from the East St. Louis Action Research Project. Planning Practice & Research: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 421-432.

America's Housing Crisis: What Is To Be Done? Chester Hartman, ed Institute For Policy Studies, Washington, D C., 1983.

&dquo;What Is To Be Done,&dquo; edited by Chester Harten, borrows part of its title from Lenin’s 1902 collection on essays on political agitation and movement building. One might also say that it borrows its central thesis from the Marxist housing literature The authors appear to agree that market forces alone cannot be expected to provide decent and affordable housing to low and moderate income Americans