Poverty, Partnerships, and Privilege: Elite Institutions and Community Empowerment

Abstract

During the 1990s, universities and foundations separately entered into community partnerships with the intent of revitalizing poor urban neighborhoods. We describe the historical context that preceded their involvement in these partnerships, outline the evolution in ideas about "community empowerment" integral to such partnerships, and explain the partnership model's attractiveness. We then analyze how and why these partnerships embraced the rhetoric of community empowerment and discuss the paradox of elites attempting to empower poor people. Our analysis suggests that these partnerships allowed for the appearance of an inclusive solution to community problems, while maintaining the legitimacy and privilege of their elite sponsors.Since the 1960s "community empowerment" has been an enduring refrain in the rhetoric surrounding U.S. anti-poverty initiatives. Policymakers have often pursued this goal without explicitly defining what it means, which has enabled them to occupy the moral high ground ("we support empowering the poor and revitalizing communities") while being ambiguous about the feasibility of their actually producing meaningful changes. During the war on poverty, community empowerment, also referred to as community action, entailed offering opportunities for poor residents to exercise their own political voice in defining the array of reforms-job creation, housing, education, and the like-aimed at improving their neighborhoods. Due to the specific manner in which the war on poverty was carried out, these community action programs gradually came under attack. During the ensuing decades, this attack became part of a broader neoconservative assault on the welfare state, culminating in a series of sweeping changes during the 1980s that shifted responsibility for social policy from the federal government to private and local organizations. Since then, anti-poverty work has for the most part been privatized (Lenkowsky, 1999;Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). The idea of community empowerment has persevered, however, with new institutional sponsors and renewed hopes for social change.We examine two types of institutions that stepped into the social policy vacuum left by the federal government: universities and foundations. We focus on their partnerships with

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