Is Your Local Community Partner Ready To Go?
<p>In July 2013, I wrote a blog proposing a four-part framework for understanding if specific local organizations have the capacity to implement CED programs. How well does this framework hold up when actually used? We answer this question using interviews with 31 local partners, over the past two years around a single, federally-funded, locally-administered community program in North Carolina. About half have given up on running the program.</p> <p>Was capacity the tipping point?</p> <p>The discussion then and now is focused on the capacity of the local partner organizations themselves to implement a federally- or state-supported program rather than community capacity to support CED writ large. This focus grew out of years of evaluations across public programs conducted by the School of Government which highlighted barriers to success around functional capacity in one form or another, and it is in line with the effort of the SOG Development Financial Initiative (DFI). It was also a response to 2010 statements by the National Association of Counties, National League of Cities and the National Governor’s Association that the recession was a “wake-up” call to the structural problem of higher demand for services without the capacity to respond. The four-part capacity framework presented three years ago included infrastructure, equipment, personnel, and administration.</p> <p>How does this framework hold up against current research in CED? Not so well, and not so bad. First, local government or non-profit organizational capacity to implement CED-specific programs is still not a major focus of academic research. Examples from CED and related programs were very specific, and more often [...]</p>
