Vision Building and the Rural Community College:
Ingredients for Successful Rural Community Development
Paper Presented
at the
Rural Community College Alliance Conference
October 9, 2002
Memphis, Tennessee
Stefani Gray Hicswa
The University of Texas, Austin
Vision Building and the Rural Community College:
Ingredients for Successful Rural Community Development
Introduction
Throughout the twentieth century, rural America has struggled to maintain a standard of living commensurate with rest of the nation. The decline of agricultural and natural resource work has left many rural communities dependent and poor (Duncan, 1999; Eller et al., 1998a, 1998b). As the national economy has shifted, jobs have become scarce and unstable in most rural communities (Tickamyer and Duncan, 1990, p. 68). These problems contribute to a cluster of social problems, including blocking the emergence of a community field and restricting the development of a complete and integral local society (Wilkinson 1991, pp. 81-86). Yet, Summers (1986, p. 352) contends, “as long as human beings confront harsh physical and social environments, there will be community as a form of collective action, because mobilization has its roots in individuals’ private troubles.” Implementing cohesive community development is difficult because fragmentation among community groups is common in many rural distressed areas (Garza & Eller, 1998; Luloff & Swanson, 1995; Miller, 1995).
Communities with knowledgeable leadership and informed, active citizen participation sustain the most successful and cohesive community development. Unfortunately, rural community leaders are usually volunteers with limited experience in involving citizen participants. Most lack sufficient skills necessary to activate citizens and implement development activities that contribute to the community’s social well being (Grymes, 1978; Kline, 1996, p. 166; Walzer, 1996, pp. 1-10 Wilkinson, 1991, p. 76).
Developing recognition of commonalities faced by community members provides solidarity of purpose, which leads to a motivational basis for creating a vision (Flora and Flora 1993; Miller 1995). However, before community leaders embark on visioning activities, they must be aware of potential difficulties and anticipate problems associated with strategic visioning.
The purpose of this paper is to explore strategic visioning barriers and identify common elements of success in rural communities. The paper begins with a description of community colleges’ community development mission and short history of community planning followed by barriers associated with community visioning and how these problems impact rural community development. The paper concludes with an overview of elements that contribute to successful community visioning.
Community Colleges’ Community Development Mission
Over the past twenty years, leaders of national organizations have explored the capacity of community college leaders to serve as community development agents. In 1980, the president of the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, Edmund J. Gleazer, posed the question, “should not the community college play a part in forecasting and in leading its community to understand the coming changes, make provisions for coping with them, and providing services to meet them?” (p. 7). The American Association of Community and Junior College’s Commission on the Future of Community Colleges addressed this is question in 1988. The Commission’s report, Building Communities: A Vision for a New Century, states, “building communities is … an especially appropriate objective for the community college because it embraces the institution’s comprehensive mission” (p. 7).
In the early 1990’s, Edgar J. Boone and George B. Vaughan, in their work with the Academy for Community College Leadership Advancement, Innovation, and Modeling (ACCLAIM), went beyond assessing community colleges leaders’ capability to enhance community development. Boone and Vaughan urged community college leaders to collaborate with other community leaders, and play appropriate roles in applying rational, orderly process to help resolve community issues (Boone & Vaughan, 1993, p. 2).
The Ford Foundation combined Boone and Vaughan’s goals of community development and access to education when they developed the Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) in 1993. In a series of Project Briefs by the American Association of Community Colleges, Eller, et al. (1998c) state, “The most successful RCCI community development teams brought together diverse elements of the community and opened dialogues.” The briefs further explain that the community development teams relied on informal communication and interpersonal leadership skills to persuade community members to assume responsibility for specific outcomes.
Research has shown that initiative strengthened rural community colleges by enhancing their capacity to serve as community development agents (Eller, et al., 1998b; MDC 1998, 2000a, 2000b) and the hub for continued innovation and change for rural communities (RCCI National Assessment Report, p. 4). As a result, Sarah Rubin and George Autry wrote a policy paper in 1998, as part of the Education Commission of the States’ (ECS) Critical Roles for Community Colleges project. The authors call for rural community colleges to be catalysts for economic renewal and build social capital to provide a foundation for community development and planning.
Recently several college administrators have successfully implemented strategic visioning programs. For example, Alabama Southern Community College leaders held a community summit in 1994 and a follow-up meeting in March 2000 to determine community priorities. Northern New Mexico Community College administrators held a series of community meetings in 1997, which led to the creation of a community development corporation. In 2000, employees at New Mexico State University - Carlsbad set up a community development day where nearly twenty-three hundred residents voted for the most desired community development projects. (MDC, Inc. & Video Dialog, Inc., 2000)
In some rural areas, community college administrators have collaborated with community leaders to incorporate vision and consensus building to unite the community into action. For example, the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s community development partnership program built local capacity for renewal and growth by using school leaders to play a vital role in community planning (Miller, 1995). However, community-planning roles have changed as approaches to planning changed.
History of Community Planning
In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt proposed programs to improve country life by bringing rural America up to twentieth-century urban standards of social and economic efficiency. Community development became a major component of the proposed rural progress program, and resulted in a decade of rural industrialization and associated service sector growth in rural America. (Fugitt, 1985; Summers & Branch, 1984; Summers, 1986)
Although formal community planning was not widely practiced before World War II, post-war needs precipitated federal funding for highway construction and antipoverty programs. Program planning efforts were usually carried out by hierarchical managers or technical experts in government. Governmental officials and the few involved in local programs held community leadership positions. (Ayers, 1996, p. 22-23)
The community planning approach shifted in the 1970s to focus on comprehensive long-range plans. Since many federal programs available during this time required a comprehensive community plan to qualify for funding, professional planners were often hired to develop them. Subsequently, local officials adopted legal mechanisms such as zoning and subdivision ordnances to enforce the objectives. Comprehensive planning was a technical process where citizens were merely informed of the effort, and citizen ownership was limited. (Ayers, 1996, p. 22-23)
Although formalized strategic planning became popular in the private sector in the 1960s (Robbins, 2000, p. 140), strategic planning did not emerge in the public sector until federal funding began to decline during the 1980’s (Bryson, 1990, p.5). During this time, government intervention in community planning was perceived as intrusive (Brager, Specht, Torczyner, 1987). This, combined with a shortage of resources and stiff economic competition, necessitated a strategic approach to community development (Ayers, 1996, p. 23).
Strategic planning offers a structured way for a community to analyze itself both internally and externally, and creates objectives to address community needs (Ayers, 1996, p. 23). The objectives coordinate efforts and give direction to community leaders to produce actions that shape the community (Bryson, 1990, p.5). The resulting action plan seeks to position a community in terms of its environment, over an extended period of five or more years (Robbins, 2000, p. 138).
Strategic visioning became the planning approach of the 1990s. Unlike strategic planning, strategic visioning first creates a future that is desirable, then works toward reaching the desired end state (Ayers, 1996, p. 23). Strategic visioning became widely known with the publication of Peter Senge’s, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990). Senge states, “A [strategic] vision is a vision that many people are … committed to because it reflects their own personal vision.” Similarly, Ayers (1996) describes creating a vision as painting a picture of what the ideal community will look like in the future.
Strategic visioning programs have proliferated in recent years (Gruidl, 1996). Although the most obvious outcome of strategic visioning programs is involving community members in creating an action plan through consensus building, most people find it difficult to move beyond the current, most pressing issues (Gruidl, 1996, p. 133). Creating a strategic vision in a rural community is hard work since most issues are complex, interrelated, and require immediate attention (Ayers, 1996; Woods, 1996, p. 80). Order and unity are always in question, and problems continually arise (Wilkinson, 1991, p. 90).
Barriers to Visioning
Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist: the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done paves the way to self-destruction rather than self preservation.
(Machiavelli, trans. 1952)
Similar to Machiavelli’s observations, de Tocqueville noted more than a century ago that people in the United States had a unique flair for organizing themselves into groups to deal with problems (de Tocqueville, trans. 1969). Judging by the proliferation of organizations, agencies, and groups dealing with every known problem, the organizing fervors noted by Machiavelli and de Tocqueville continue to thrive today. Yet, the results are not commensurate with the gravity of the problems or the effort expended (Fessler, 1976, p.1).
Consequently, strategic visioning has come under increased criticism in recent years. Although visioning has an intuitive appeal in rural areas, there are several arguments against strategic visioning programs, including issues of defining the community, rural mobilization, and the culture of local structures and systems. The following overview describes these barriers to successful strategic visioning in rural communities.
Issues
To understand the barriers associated with strategic visioning it is important to understand the issues confronting rural community leaders seeking to formulate a vision. According to Summers (1986, p. 354), tension exists between those who view the community as the causal factor in the well being of residents, and those who view community as the stratification system, power structure or human ecology in a locale.
Warren (1970, pp. 536-541) notes that the ambiguity regarding the definition of community is linked to problems associated with identifying relationships within a community. Determining which people within the community should interact and how well they should be expected to know each other must be addressed before beginning a visioning process. Unless community leaders have a clear conception of how they view community, they cannot set realistic community development goals or measure progress toward objectives (Warren, 1970). In defining community, residents also need to determine their desired level of local autonomy, as federal and state grant programs often place considerable limitations on local freedom.
If communities are serious about strategic visioning, they must also confront the issue of power in the community. The power elite is usually involved in community planning, as they contribute resources and manipulate the process to benefit the “haves.” A community visioning process is likely to cause power imbalances. However, in order to insure successful strategic visioning leaders must involve the community’s powerless (i.e. the poor and minorities) in the process, as the “have-nots,” are those most affected by the plan (Warren, 1970, pp. 536-541). According to Alinsky in Rules for Radicals (1971), involving and mobilizing the “have-a-little-want-more’s” is the most effective method of confronting community power.
In addition to confronting power issues, community leaders, must determine how widespread participation should be and decide the limits of involvement and commitment at each level (Warren, 1970, pp. 536-541). The plan is meaningless to those who do not participate, yet it is impossible to involve everyone in a visioning process. Although many community leaders seek to achieve participation and commitment that comes with shared visioning, many community members think that planning is the top leader’s job. On the other hand, many leaders prefer to impose a community plan rather than involve citizens in the process. (Senge, Roberts, Ross, Smith, and Kleiner, 1994, p. 298)
The value of citizen participation has risen to prominence in community life in recent years. Citizen participation is best captured by the slogan, “one man – one vote.” Programmatically this is seen to achieve participatory democracy. However, because people differ so considerably in respect to interests, needs, resources, motivations, and abilities, participation is often fragmented and partial. (Brager, et al., 1987, p.4; Warren 1970, pp. 540)
Before embarking on a strategic visioning process the extent of conflict within the community must be analyzed. Community leaders should determine the extent to which they will tolerate or encourage conflict in the process, as visioning models are often based on consensus. Visioning processes that allow for and encourage appropriate conflict are more likely to be successful because consensus models often permit the continuation of the status quo and/or the continuation of gross injustices (Warren 1970, pp. 536-541). Because reaching consensus is difficult, public scrutiny and rumors may begin to infiltrate the process and hinder the visioning program (Kline, 1996, p. 161).
Rural strategic visioning has been marked by a continuing search for and struggle over the means by which to reconcile these important and competing issues (Brager et al., 1987, p. 4). While all of these issues must be considered in strategic visioning, it is important to realize some concerns are incompatible and irreconcilable.
Rural Mobilization
In addition to the difficulties associated with defining and confronting community issues, rural communities struggle with mobilizing the community to participate in planning and implementing strategic visioning programs. If community organizations are apathetic, disorganized or torn by dissention, the base of support for vision implementation is narrow (Ross & Lappin, 1967). Reed, Reed and Luke (1987) observed that planning efforts fail if communities lack the capacity to participate.