The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change

In the 1990s, comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) arose as an ambitious strategy to address the needs of residents of poor communities. They intended to go beyond the achievements of existing community-based organizations, notably social service agencies and community development corporations (CDCs), by concentrating resources and combining the “best” of what had been learned from social, economic, physical, and civic development in order to catalyze transformation of distressed neighborhoods. The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change has reviewed 48 major CCIs and related community change efforts of the past two decades. By assessing the evidence about what CCIs and related community change efforts have accomplished, summarizing key lessons, and providing commentary from a variety of practitioners and observers, this volume offers a framework for thinking about place-based investing in the future.
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