Do participants consider community initiatives as successful, and if so why?

Abstract

Community-initiatives (CIs) - as residents' bottom-up initiated collective efforts to improve the livability of their everyday-world - increasingly attract scholarly attention. From an urban vitality perspective understanding CI-participants' evaluations of CI-success is crucial. We make two contributions to this topic: first by presenting new evidence on participants' evaluations of CI-success; second by providing a theoretically grounded, empirically validated explanation of perceived CI-success, combining agent-based and often-neglected structural factors.This article primarily uses survey-data from a CI-initiator-sample of 129 CIs from 22 municipalities in the Dutch province Overijssel (using snowball-sampling); but findings were validated by additional survey-results (from a province-wide probability-sample) of 179 CI-participants. We found that most initiators/participants consider CIs as successful, that the odds for CI-success were not different for privileged and underprivileged groups, and in more and less urbanized municipalities. Moreover, odds for CI-success were higher in larger groups and for CIs receiving municipal financial support.