The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

CommUNITY 2000

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Civil Rights and Fair Housing Today
• CommUNITY2000: What is it? Why is it?
  • Purposes of CommUNITY 2000: Developing, Documenting and Reporting
  • Funding: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
  • Overview of Partners for First 18 Months
• Building Communities With a Menu of Strategies
  • Accomplishments for Modeling by Organizations Nationwide
  • Successful Strategies: The National Partners
  • Successful Strategies: Local Partners
  • Contact Information
• National Partners
  • Building Community Throughout the Country
  • National Advisory Board
• The Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston
• Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities
• Access Living
• The Fair Housing Council of San Diego
• Building Community for the Future
• Appendix A: Case Studies on Coalition Building Activities
  • Introduction
  • Case Study Methodology
  • City Approaches to Community Tensions
  • Cross Cutting Themes
  • Recommendations
• Appendix B: Census 2000 Charts
• Acknowledgements

Case Study Methodology

Our study is organized around the following broad sets of questions germane to whether other groups around the country are forming or have formed coalitions or networks to address the issue of community tensions:

• What was the potential for the formation of coalitions among fair housing groups, intergroup relations advocates, civil rights organizations and "mainstream" organizations in communities other than the CommUNITY 2000 pilot sites?
• What was the effectiveness of coalitions in instances where they do exist and the barriers to their formation in instances where they do not?
• Where collaborations do exist, what are the factors that are most relevant to the creation, as well as the depth and breadth, of such collaboration?

To address these questions, the following framework was designed. We sought first to identify the geographic focus of our research, based on our assessment of locales that might be fertile ground for inter-organizational collaboration. Beginning with the basic assumption that an important indicator of the likelihood of collaboration would be the presence of multiple organizations in a city with missions related to community tensions prevention and reduction, we focused on cities that met the following criteria:

• Cities that had affiliate chapters of both the National Conference of Community and Justice (NCCJ) and the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA). Both of these organizations were deemed to be important participants in any coalition aiming to address housing-related community tensions.
• Of these, cities that had experienced relatively recent high profile incidents which raised awareness around community tensions issues. For this purpose, we did not attempt to limit the definition of "incident." Thus, we considered incidents as varied as the publication of a fair housing Analysis of Impediments report to a widely publicized hate crime.

We expected that any city that met both of these criteria would hold great potential for inter-organizational collaboration, whether this collaboration actually occurred or not. Using this criteria, we focused on the following sites: Atlanta, GA; Cincinnati, OH; Durham, NC; Houston, TX; Louisville, KY; New Orleans, LA; Omaha, NE; Phoenix, AZ; Pittsburgh, PA; and Richmond, VA.

Once these cities were determined, we then identified the people in each city with whom we would conduct interviews to explore the factors that we had determined were most likely to promote a coalition-based approach. We developed an initial list of contacts based on recommendations from national staff at NCCJ and NFHA. In the course of these interviews, additional contacts were generated, which we also pursued.

Through these interviews, we collected data that formed the basis of the following profiles of the collaboration occurring in individual cities. This data also helped us identify cross-cutting themes reflecting the factors that, in general, appeared to influence collaboration and coalition building between different groups likely to be concerned with tensions in their communities. Finally, our field research in the ten cities we studied formed the basis of the recommendations that appear at the conclusion of this report.