Building Organized Communities & Social Capital

The building of organized communities and social capital is critical to raising poorer neighborhoods and impoverished nations from the dust. Until communities are organized, they are not empowered; they are dependent upon outside support and subject to the many forces that they have no defense for: poverty, starvation, social injustice, lack of education, alienation, and the ravages of disease. Once organized into a community, they are no longer the isolated voices of the oppressed but one unified voice with the combined resources of the others behind it. To achieve this level of empowerment, a community must be organized so that the community itself can meet the needs of the people. However, organization alone cannot accomplish everything that makes a community successful; social capital is the heart and soul of a community. No matter how many programs a community has, it can still fail without social capital. This paper presents an approach for building organized communities with social capitalùcommunities the way they are meant to be.

To begin the process of building an organized community, the first step is to set up a working group that has the responsibility for initiating, monitoring, and facilitating the process. This groupùmost likely a committeeùis the focal entity for catalyzing change, bringing together the people who need to provide assistance, and facilitating decision-making.

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. When people must steal to live, crime escalates. When people must steal to live, but they refuse to compromise their integrity by doing so, they will die; the community dies as well if it cannot find ways to support its people. Therefore, a public services initiative must be taken seriously and supported unequivocally. One of the primary goals of a community is to provide protection and the necessities of life to its inhabitants. Although every community needs to do all it can to prevent homelessness, unfortunately, there are poor in virtually every neighborhood. Until poverty is eradicated from the earth, the poor must be considered. Rather than set up a few programs geared to the poor and hope that these will take care of the problem, the community needs to be aggressive and proactive in seeking out the displaced, the unfortunate, the mentally ill, and the victims of crime. Volunteer organizations that find and assist these people can be set up, and if additional funding is needed, the community can develop an assistance fund as well. Shelters must be set up to house the homeless or those recovering from natural disasters such as flooding or fire. Such shelters should not be promoted as a way of life but must be pro
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Approximate Word count = 10499
Approximate Pages = 42 (250 words per page)

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