Almost a century ago American organizational theorist Mary Parker Follett (1919), described community as a “creative process” of participation, deliberation and integration. Public management’s interest in citizen participation as a creator of community has gone in and out of fashion, currently resurging as part of a larger movement of place-based philanthropy aimed at facilitating new community development forms (Eaterling & Millesen, 2015; Ferris & Hopkins, 2015; Murdoch et al., 2007). While citizen-based initiatives may appear as autonomous, self-organized action, the enabling environments – grassroots capacity, leadership skills and spaces for community deliberation – often need cultivation before citizens can effectively engage (Auspos et al., 2009; Berry et al., 1993), particularly in disadvantaged communities. This capacity is stemming primarily from community and private foundations, not governments. Indeed, the foundation collaborations sometimes evident represent creative subcommunities themselves within the philanthropy sector.
A key place-based philanthropy challenge is to respond to and support community without being overly directive, while also serving the goals of the investing community/ private foundations . The further challenge is to avoid dependency relationships forming with the enabling sources. This paper explores the effectiveness of organized philanthropy in supporting citizen participation in community development in Australia and Canada. Both have similar issues of community development, and established, but quite different, place-based philanthropy institutions.
The paper has three objectives: 1) through a systematic review of the small but growing corpus of placed-based philanthropy, identify the factors that foster the participatory, ‘creative’ process of community described by Follett; 2) compare primary place-based philanthropic initiatives in Australia and Canada; and 3) assess available evidence as to how these are influencing the ability of communities to scale up and support enhanced citizen engagement and citizen movements. Australia and Canada are instructive cases for other countries. The foundations engaged in supporting community building are of modest size, as available in many other countries, both are experimenting with a variety of investments and capacity-building tools (Burkett, 2012; Phillips et al., 2016; Smyllie et al., 2011) and often seek innovative solutions to indigenous and other disadvantage. Finally, as federations with differing place-based and community development policies by the subnational governments, we can test the intersections of public policy, philanthropy and community.
References
Aspen Institute. (2015, September). Towards a better place: Washington: Aspen Institute.
Berry, J. M., et al. (1993). The rebirth of urban democracy. Washington: Brookings Institution.
Burkett, I. (2012) Place-based impact investment in Australia. Sydney: National Library of Australia.
Ferris, J. M., & Hopkins, E. (2015). Place-based initiatives, Foundation Review, 7(4), 97-109.
Follett, M. P. (1919) Community is a process. Philosophical Review, 28(6), 576-588.
Murdoch, J. et al. (2007) The place-based strategic philanthropy model. Dallas: Centre for Urban Economics, University of Texas .
Phillips, S. D. et al. (2016) Knowledge as Leadership, Belonging as Community: How Canadian Community Foundations are using Vital Signs, Foundation Review, 8: 65-79.
Smyllie S., Scaife W., McDonald K. (2011) That's what governments do: Exploring fundamental barriers to public-philanthropic interaction: The example of indigenous well-being, Public Management Review, 13 (8): 1139-1154.
D1 - Community self-organization: how is it shaped in different political-administrative c
