The Promise of Comprehensive Community Development: Ten Years of Chicago's New Communities Program

Abstract

From 2002 to 2012, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided $50 million to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of Chicago (LISC Chicago), to implement the New Communities Program (NCP). NCP supported community organizations in 14 neighborhood areas to convene local partners to define a “quality-of-life plan” for each neighborhood. It then provided grants to carry out these plans, which addressed a variety of local challenges, including unemployment, struggling schools, and gang violence.MacArthur’s investment was informed by research that residents have better outcomes when they live in neighborhoods where individuals and organizations come together to respond to local challenges. For its part, LISC Chicago wanted to help local agencies learn to work together to resolve long-standing antagonisms when they existed and to facilitate implementation of diverse community improvement projects. This report describes the challenges that NCP faced, the extent to which it achieved its goals, and the implications for similar initiatives. As a model for recent federal policy, the NCP experience is particularly important to consider.Building on the NCP experience, MacArthur and LISC have launched a next-generation initiative, “Testing the Model” (TTM). Like the original NCP model, TTM attempts to deliver resources to neighborhoods, but these investments are explicitly aimed at achieving longer-term change by concentrating efforts on a single issue or domain. Future work will report on the implementation of TTM and how neighborhoods are changing in these targeted domains.