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1. PHILSOCORDS Community Building: Hope and Cautions
By: Miss Reynalda C. Oporto
Moving beyond bricks and mortar, community development corporations are taking
on more diverse and comprehensive roles in redeveloping their communities. But the
team of Philippines Social Community Organizer’s & Developing Socirty “ PHILSOCORDS”
lead the truck as cargo’s of empowerment for operational changed Philippines.
PHILSOCORDS up to the challenge? Do they have the support from their
communities, funders, or even their own organizations?
An important and positive shift is taking place in the community development movement, a shift
that holds great promise for poor communities in done scholars and political leaders who only
build their own dynasty. This Cargo , known as "community building," has come to stand for a
more comprehensive approach to community renewal than has been practiced in the past. It is
based on an understanding that the best way to fight poverty and increase economic opportunity
in poor neighborhoods is to invest in the kinds of social capital that comprise the "fabric" of
community: mutual assistance networks, social and economic relationships, public safety, and
education, to name a few.
Today, the emergence of the community building movement is challenging community-based
organizations such as PHILSOCORDS to broad their efforts and reconnect with residents. In the
process these same organizations are needs tools and reexamined their relationship with, and role
within, the communities they serve. Practitioners students and educators , funders,board leader
and policy experts in our field now have an opportunity to practice a more direct and aggressive
strategy of community action for a changed.

2. What Exactly is Community Building?
While the term "community building" tends to cover a wide range of approaches, for
PHILSOCORDS leaders volunteers at least, it has come to be defined by a number of
important Cargo truck in the practice of community development:
 A Cargo truck toward more comprehensive approaches to community development that
involve a wide range of non–bricks and mortar activities. Also, a perspective that
recognizes the multiple linkages between housing and economic development and the
wide range of efforts that the local community of the intire country support the
corporation refers as "social development."
 A heavier emphasis on how you carrier the community organizing as a strategy for
identifying and developing community leaders and shaping the kinds of local issues that
affect the progress of the community renewal effort.
 A creative beautiful emphasis on community planning, and the development of a
community building plan, as a prerequisite to development activities.
 A more intensive effort to include and involve neighborhood residents in the
organization, planning, and implementation of community renewal efforts. This stems
from a recognition that when residents have a stake in making positive change, the
change is likely to be more long-lasting dream that our arising generation exercise it.
 More emphasis on making sure there are clear lines of accountability between the
PHILSOCORDS and the community represents by their interest to adopt changes for
their living status..
 More interesting ideas in developing collaborative relationships among PHILSOCORDS
leaders volunteers for achieving a continue of support at the neighborhood level.
Community building as an approach is not new, but it has been practiced by a small minority of
provinces. Some, like the cooperatives for helping hand or as my practice of Hand Up for the
less, To maintained a strong community organizing component while developing hundreds of
units of affordable housing. Others, like the urban poor community housing development .We
need a Corporation in many area’s of minorities community as their cooperative center, have
successfully packaged advocacy, youth development, and a wide range of "social development"
programs with their housing and commercial development work. Other non-PHILSOCORDS
models such as the Floating homes, , have emerged over the years, practicing a form of
community building that combines organizing, neighborhood planning, physical development,
and human development.
For years, however, biases among funders of community efforts, and among community
development practitioners themselves, toward a housing production agenda have made
sustaining these broad, activist approaches extremely difficult. The major funders of project
have viewed community building work as ancillary to the principal real estate development work
of the corporation. The few fund amount available for community organizing have flowed
toward so-called "pure" organizing groups.

3. These attitudes are now running , and community building practices are emerging into the
mainstream. Most of the major national foundations, and of late, many of the stronger regional
and community foundations are sponsoring their own versions of comprehensive community
building initiatives. In almost every case, funders are exercising a higher level of involvement
than in the past in program design and implementation. Technical assistance organizations,
consultants, and intermediary groups are getting involved in this work in large numbers. In
addition, a number of national alliances have formed to support this work. Most notable are the
National Community Building Network (NCBN), an alliance of funders of "locally driven urban
initiatives" formed by influence public policy and provide forums to discuss community building
initiatives, and the Institute's of comprehensive community social housing revits by power of
demanding pocketer.This is what I seen and observe per corporation ,leadership and head
monetizer attitudes.I will not accept this being part of my organization. Lets work together to
creates beautiful tomorrow.
MY EARLY LESSONS
These early days of the community building movement have had many success stories. A my
early young age of 17 year-old I used to lead commonal garden for youth, for the first time in
years, conducting a resident-driven planning process to determine the future development needs
of the neighborhood. My OLIDA organization (Olitawo-Binata & Dalaga -Daga) now the
community changed the name of Youth Zone is expanding its work to remote area’s of my
place were I grow up, efforts in community organizing and cultural development. A
PHILSOCORDS is developing incorporated field as team of direct community organizers to
build resident leaders and shape a community agenda. A tribal youth development group is
beginning on major youth leadership that we need to effort and support their portal vision.
Youth for human right movement is young and, not surprisingly, has its share of growing pains.
As what I meet on my fishing activity in Metro Manila as lumad member in tribal group of
Mindanao.
Lets Face An Awkward Courtship Beyond
Funders and PHILSOCORDS are engaged in a kind of awkward courting ritual over the scale of
community building efforts. It may be fair to say that at this time funders and policy people are
far more exuberant and clear about the potential for community building than the practitioners –
the staff and leaders of the PHILSOCORDS who are needed to carry out this work. For leaders
and volunteers , this cargo truck is coming after years of accumulating a real estate development
portfolio, and at a time when organizations are embattled by budget cuts and worsening local
conditions. According to some characters of fantasy of the conservation of legacy is concervation
of your dreamed. A car with out engine and finish mannover process is useless specially if the
driver is drunk. "One reason that manager staff and leaders are tired is that they have had to
struggle for decades to find ways, by hook or by crook,as long don’t meet to serve the diverse
funding needs of their community in a funding environment that has encouraged a narrow
production-oriented agenda." Today, there are few organizations with the energy and capacity to
take on the kind of organizational challenges which this work purposses.

4. PHILSOCORDS are participating in these efforts for a wide variety of reasons. Many see it as a
source of core operating support or "soft" program money that they can use as flexible revenue to
fill gaps in staffing. Some leaders, recognizing that the future holds fewer housing resources, are
searching for another important role to play in the community. Others, recognizing the
limitations of real estate based strategies, are trying to address the "human development" needs
of their residents. Still others, who have gotten away from or never developed the ability to
organize and mobilize their constituency, are feeling the need to develop more political clout in
an age of dwindling resources.
Providing the tools of Organization
For some leaders, the community building program can be like a Trojan Horse, arriving as a
promising source of flexible operating support but causing some unintended and unanticipated
consequences for the organization, its board, and its executive director. Building and integrating
the core capacities required by successful community building efforts is not like adding another
program or product. Rather, these changes often demand a fundamental redefinition of the
organization and its relationship to the community it serves.
Because many of the groups participating in community building initiatives principally work in
real estate development, they sometimes have a difficult time adapting to community building
approaches. Their real estate work tends to be structured, disciplined, and outcome oriented. Yet,
curiously, this same level of discipline and structure often does not extend to the newer work.
First, community-based groups remain preoccupied with a real estate development agenda,
which is still viewed as the bread and butter of the organization. Second, a strong bias remains,
reflected in the labeling of real estate related work as "hard" and non–real estate related work as
"soft." Soft work is viewed as work that is hard to define, can be accomplished in the margins,
and that just about anyone can do. These efforts are often taken on with a lower level of
expectations, a measure of ambivalence, and/or a lack of clarity by the organization's leadership.
Missing Standards
Community building projects are often ill-defined at the point of funding. Early efforts tend to be
loosely organized with little quality control. Because the quality and outcomes of this work can
be more difficult to measure than housing production, it can be difficult to distinguish between
excellence and mediocrity, between a group that is going through the motions and a group with
real ambition. We, as a field, have not yet developed a strong enough body of best practice or
industry standards for this work from which to easily separate the high quality performers from
the rest of the field. Leaders and funders alike are grasping for ways to define success.
The challenge in the future for Leaders will be to develop industry standards and measures so
that a body of best practices can be developed. The challenge in the future for funders will be to
select group leaders that are cognizant of, and interested in, making fundamental shifts in the
way they do business. PHILSOCORDS team that understand and want the kinds of challenges
and benefits that a community building approach can offer will fair far better than those that
money feedlers who don’t understand it or are ambivalent, even if they appear to have more
organizational capacity.

5. The New Directions in Community Organizing
Community building calls for close coordination between the Admin leadership and the
organizer, and a clearly defined organizing strategy. It also calls for a different type of
organizing, where the goal is to build strong organizations, develop local leaders, forge strong
partnerships and associations at the local level, and search for common ground among disparate
interests. This is in contrast to some traditional organizing models, the objective of which is to
identify and exploit points of conflict in order to mobilize a constituency against a specified
target.
Almost without exception, existing or emerging Admin of PHILSOCORDS engaged in
community building efforts perform some type of community organizing. This work is difficult
to do well and can be extremely challenging and even disruptive to many groups, particularly
those that are not ready to open themselves up to a new level of participation and community
scrutiny.
Community organizers often complain of a lack of support and direction from their boards or
staff supervisors. When new organizers are brought into the organization, they rarely have the
support and guidance they need to succeed. In many cases there is no culture of organizing in the
Admin , and the executive director is not oriented enough to the work to provide adequate
support to the organizer. Sometimes, because of past history, key staff or board members are
skeptical or fearful of community organizing. Often the community organizing strategy is not
sufficiently clear or well understood.
"We have learned that the community building effort needs a strategic plan to keep on track;
otherwise the organizer may put out a lot of effort but not see tangible results," said
“PHILSOCORDS community organizer for local and regional area of tribal in Philippines .
"The plan needs to have a significant amount of support from influential people in the
organization. This doesn't happen right away. I have had to educate people in the organization
about what I do and why this is important to all Filipino."
Over time, the organizer's work becomes more and more disjointed. The organizer becomes seen
as a kind of utility outreach/event specialist whose job is to service the other "line staff" in the
organization. This situation can be extremely frustrating for the organizer. In one municipality-
based organization participating in a community building effort, three different community
organizers were hired and left over a one-year period. Minimally, the new organizer is under-
utilized and the community building effort suffers.
The Challenges from the Community
If the organizer is dynamic and successful despite a lack of organizational support and direction,
the situation can become even more hazardous. In some cases, organizers have successfully built
new constituencies (task forces, committees, etc.) among residents, only to then meet resistance
as they attempt to integrate these new people into the organization. The new constituents
inevitably challenge the existing leadership seeking a role in redefining the organization or
shifting its programmatic emphasis. The friction that this causes between the Admin and

6. emerging groups of resident leaders can ultimately be productive, but, if handled haphazardly, it
can also be very damaging to the PHILSOCORDS administration and the community renewal
effort.
Organizing in the community building context calls for a more mature and sophisticated brand of
community organizer. The census survey is a national training and technical assistance
organization practice many years ago " organizing approaches described above. Lead technical
derictors recruits and teaches new organizers the set of skills and strategies needed in this
environment. Mostly the lead organizers need the ability to listen, to think strategically, to sort
out agendas, to build confidence and encourage participation in a wide range of groups. Mostly
the organizer needs the ability to build trust in a process or an initiative. All of these are difficult
tasks in an age of cynicism and distrust."
The Emerging Models of Neighborhood Planning
Most community building efforts challenge PHILSOCORDS leaders do more planning, both
internally and within their target neighborhoods. In some initiatives, the first year or two of work
is dedicated to developing a community plan. This can be a difficult adjustment. Few groups
have experience in planning, particularly community planning. The entrepreneurial culture of
many of our most successful leaders & volunteers can work against a serious investment in
planning, particularly in organizations where the top staff and key board members see
themselves as "product" people and the organizers as the "process" people. Some leaders also
resent this emphasis on planning because it means opening up their decision-making process to
residents and institutions that have not been involved in the organization.
Traditional planning processes have proven to be too limited for this work. Newer, hybrid
models that combine community organizing strategies and more creative planning techniques are
emerging. These are proving effective in identifying community strengths and assets, and
solutions that are more organic to the community's values, culture, and situation.
The Neighborhood Initiative has developed a style of long-term neighborhood planning that is
integrated with shorter term community organizing "signature campaigns" – short, winnable
issue-based efforts that feed people energy and substance to the longer-term, slower-paced
planning work. This strategy has proven successful in moving a comprehensive community
renewal effort forward. Also, the "asset-based planning" style being taught as commander of
network and others is much more conducive to community building work because it focuses on
building hope, linkages, and leadership, and teaching people about the inner workings of their
communities.
New Forms of Building Local Democratic Institutions
"In a democracy, the science of associations is the mother science, the progress of all the rest
depends on the progress it has made."
Community building is challenging all of us to look harder at this science of associations, the
forms of community connections that we are building at the local level. As government, political

7. party apparatus, and other local institutions lose influence, Leaders are assuming a larger and
larger role as what they can make, it refers to as the "mediating" organizations. In addition, the
community building movement has placed a heavier emphasis on increased resident involvement
and institutional collaboration. Community building calls for Administrative roles or their
collaborative to take a more active role as a new local planning and decision-making apparatus.
The Resident Involvement vs. the Assumption of Representation
Building and sustaining resident involvement is one of the least understood and toughest aspects
of community building, yet it is the foundation of all else. Some Leaders, student , volunteer are
very capable in this area and have made a significant investment in building their base of
support. Some Leaders s hold to an assumption of representation that prohibits them from
looking closely at this issue.
At a recent training session with participants of Community Building Leadership Initiative, a
major national effort involving dozens of organizational team work, we assembled teams from
each of five participating division in a major regional city. These teams included the executive
directors, the community organizers in charge of the "community building" work, and residents
who served as members of the PHILSOCORDS board or as community volunteers. At one
point in the session, we separated the group into clusters according to roles – the executive
directors, the community organizers, and the neighborhood residents. We asked each group to
reflect on their role in the team and the kinds of things they needed from their partners. An
important dynamic emerged. The executive directors saw the leadership work s as the
community and wanted to be trusted. The neighborhood residents (residents who are involved
with and friendly to the Admin ) clearly saw the community and the Leaders ,volunteers as very
different. They saw the Group team as another institution within the community. They wanted to
make sure that the admin,leaders' staffs understood that they were accountable to the community.
And they wanted assurance that the initiative would be "a community building effort, not a
PHILSOCORDS honor building effort."
As long as organization sees itself as the community, it cannot work effectively to improve its
representation of the community. Once you remove that assumption, you must then look at the
specific or relative degrees of representation, and reconcile yourself to the necessity of working
toward better representation. These tough realizations are essential to strengthening the field.
The Blinding Enthusiasm
Institutional and community collaboration is an important element in the evolution of community
associations, and it tends to be emphasized by some of the prominent funder-driven community-
building initiatives. However, in the zealous pursuit of collaboration, funders risk losing sight of
larger issues such as organizational capacity, community politics, and institutional relationships.
A strong partnership must have a compelling and clear purpose, based on self-interest, to sustain
it through the difficult work of building and implementing initiatives. At the community level,
collaboration is a vehicle, not an end. According to Sociology expert, "Collaboration among
Leaders, residents, and other community institutions tends to be messy: complex and time
consuming and not conducive to neat, predetermined funder time constraints or traditional

8. definitions of results. A number of important national and regional initiatives have all had to add
time to the project due largely to the underestimation of the time it would take for effective
collaborations to be formed and functioning." Funders and Leaders boards have much work to do
to sort out the myriad objectives behind the "collaboration" mantra, to ensure that these
partnerships are built for the right reasons.
THE FUTURE DIRECTIONS
The future work of community builders must be focused on doing a few things well.
To Develop Core Capacities in Organizing and Planning
There remain too few opportunities for those in the field, particularly young people to access
quality training and support in the basic tools of community organizing and community planning,
such as community analysis and assessment, one-on-ones, small group facilitation, coalition
building, and so on. Unfortunately, much of the organizing training available is either steeped in
dogma or directly connected to specific models of organizing. Organizing chauvinism and the
myth of pure or "real" organizing has not served our movement well. Not every organizer will be
or needs to be another WARRIOR CHARACTER . Organizing has to be seen less as a sacred
noble profession and more as a set of skills that can be learned and practiced by all kinds of
people, in a variety of organizational settings. Specifically, we need to touch the heart of peoples:
 Increase support for training and recruitment of young community organizers, who can
be trained thoroughly in the art/science of community building styles of organizing and
community planning.
 Expose executive directors and key board personnel, whose organizations are
participating in community-building efforts, to new organizing approaches such as
Consensus Organizing. They should also be trained in, or at least become acquainted
with, the variety of neighborhood planning models that can be applied in various
situations.
 Break down the chauvinism in the field between product and process people. We need to
elevate community organizers and planners to senior positions in Leadership and move
them toward a pay scale that is equivalent to the technical staff.
 Engage urban planning networks in new discussions about grassroots community
planning techniques being practiced by community building groups.
 Organize forums among practitioners and activists to take more control over defining this
work and developing pragmatic measures of success and standards of practice that will
elevate the common denominator in the field.
To Build Organizational Strength
One wouldn't build a skyscraper on a foundation of sticks and mud. Yet, there is some danger of
this happening in the community-building movement. The foundation of this entire movement is
the PHILSOCORDS and its ability to play an effective role both representing and serving its
community. Yet there remains comparably little investment in core operating support and
helping to retool Leaders so they can develop the new capacities needed to do this work

9. effectively. Organizational development resources and technical assistance need to be a sizable
component of any community building initiative.
The Promising Community Builders
Community building is helping to refocus our movement on the full range of changes needed to
renew community and rebuild poor neighborhoods. It represents a more honest view of the
complexity and richness of the struggle.
The promise of community building will not fully reveal itself in the years, given years, or even
after wards years. It may require at least a generation of sustained support, dialogue, and major
investment in evaluation and peer learning in order to mine from this work the new paradigms
that will guide the progres Philippines community life in the next century.
PHILSOCORDS Builders Formation-UnitedGroupofSponsors – The Leaders& Volunteersfor fields.
Local & National Technical leaders,Youth & out ofschool youth, Educators & Financial supporters.