MEASURES OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
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can be clearly delineated. Central to such a rejuvenated professional training is a restatement of the goals of community development which can be meaningful both to the faculty and students involved in such training programs and to community leaders who, in time, will become the employers of these professional skills. It is to be hoped that the final product of the review and evaluation of the present state of community development relative to its long-run goals will be a codification of procedures for effective voluntaristic community action.
The analysis of measures of effective community development can best begin by noting what the practitioners of this movement have done in the past to improve local situations. The strategy of community development has been planned innovation in local activities to meet unsatisfied expectations concerning the total community environment. The basic tactic of the movement was an activation of local leadership and of individual capacities to satisfy unfulfilled standards of community life. Practice of community action, therefore, called for the agents of the movement to diagnose community needs, to detect human resources and skills which could meet these needs and to mobilize on a voluntaristic basis community leaders and specialists to accomplish a community program. The question is, how effective, given the challenges which have plagued communities in modern industrial society, have these procedures been? The test of effectiveness is dependent upon the establishment of some standard of success or failure which can be applied to cases of community action.
The measurement of the success of particular programs of community development is, however, a complicated task. The viewpoint toward the meaning of an innovation in the local environment varies among the parties concerned with such change. At least four separate groups are immediately involved in the consequences of attempts at community development. They are: (I) the professionals and specialists who are occupationally identified with such attempts, (II) the community leaders who sponsor and work with the program, (III) other members of the community who can benefit from the results of the program, and (IV) those community members who feel or act as if their interests are threatened by the program. The last group is not always recognized as a necessary element in every program of community development, but it is a rare program which, as one study shows3, does not engender an opposition to some aspect of planned local innovation. It would, therefore, not be accurate simply to take a public opinion poll in an area to measure the actual effectiveness of a development program. For example, the involvement of citizens in a successful move to establish a city plan commission or a mental health clinic might be a matter of indifference to many people, might be vigorously opposed by a small faction, and might be an unqualified victory to some organizations of local leaders and outside professionals. In this case the results of a community-wide poll would distort
3 Janes, Robert W. and Miller, Harry L., « Factors in Community Action Programs ». Social Problems, Vol. VI, No. 1, Summer 1958, pp. 51-58.