Through its innovative network organizing approach, Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) of Lawrence, Massachusetts, has built a membership of more than 800 members in less than five years. They are coming into LCW through dozens of different “doors”: NeighborCircles and Property Improvement Committees (PICs), Family Asset Building programs (FAB), neighborhood issues, youth programs, PODER Leadership Experience, and a wide range of working committees. Many members participate in more than one part of the network. Many are giving to the network at least as much as they are getting back.

Lawrence, Massachusetts, is an old industrial city built in the mid-1800s for textile manufacturing. It is small, less than seven square miles, but very dense, with a population of 75,000. It is the 23rd poorest city in the United States.
 
Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) is a community development corporation dedicated to the sustained economic and physical revitalization of the city. It had its beginnings in the early 1980s’ struggle to build affordable housing in North Lawrence, and has built or renovated nearly 200 units for affordable housing for the people of Lawrence.
 
Since 1999, LCW has grown to include 820 members, 20 staff, a board of 15, and a number of significant accomplishments. All this is due in large part to the dedication of staff, no matter what their job function, to commit to a “network organizing” approach to building resident engagement.
 
Network organizing is really a hybrid of a lot of the established practices of community organizing and resident engagement – with a few twists. LCW uses “network theory” to guide thinking about the best infrastructure and framework for structuring meaningful and valuable connections among people.
 
LCW’s ultimate goal is to build an environment that maximizes the ability of people to establish and nurture connections that are mutually beneficial, and to eliminate a lot of the barriers and fear to engaging in public life and collective action.

Provisionality.  LCW believes that form needs to follow function – that all the power structures (committees, working groups, and so on) have to be seen as “provisional” – useful only in that they get residents to where they need to go. LCW believes that in community organizing and community building, practitioners suffer greatly from dysfunctional or old organizational structures that persist long after their usefulness and have no real connection to action or accountability. LCW believes, instead, that creating an environment where no one gets too comfortable in positions of power is an important precondition to creating accessible and accountable groups.

Open Architecture.  LCW feels that groups usually become inaccessible to new people almost as soon as they are formed. Instead, LCW builds groups that stay open and accessible over time. Its approach is to downplay formal leadership roles, and embrace the notion that the form should change a lot, depending on the stage of the work. LCW also emphasizes that the purpose of a group is to “act,” not to “be.” LCW has found these to be subtle but powerful shifts in thinking and practice. It calls these forms “open architecture,” in that they are as informal as possible while still having the capacity to act. They are structured so that new people can come in at any point along the way and quickly feel a sense of ownership of the group. LCW’s Property Improvement Committee (PIC) approach, NeighborCircles, and the Reviviendo Gateway Initiative (RGI) are examples of “open architecture” forms.

Low-Level Affiliation.  LCW strives to create an organizational environment that keys into, as naturally as possible, the flow of people’s lives. It feels that its organizational environment must embrace changeability and flexibility and have places for all levels of engagement. The environment must maximize the number of choices, the ability to self-navigate, and the potential for someone to work with others to build the things they want to see happening.

Many Doors, Options.  The LCW network is like a big room, with a lot of different activities taking place. It needs a lot of doors – and a lot of different kinds of doors – that are accessible and interesting to a wide range of people. At LCW, NeighborCircles, PODER, FAB, Young Professionals, Affordable Housing, playground projects, issue committees, all are seen as “doors” into the network. Because they are different kinds of doors, they can attract different kinds of people, with different needs and interests.

Linkages.  LCW’s network theory talks about strong and weak linkages. Strong linkages are those between and among people who are part of tight groups. For instance, the 12 IDA women in cohort #1 build, over time, strong personal connections and relationships. That is a good thing. But a network requires that a group also is always looking outward, toward other connections. So trying to forge “weak linkages” to other groups is really what makes a network. As stewards of the Family Network, they always are looking for opportunities to forge those weak linkages across groups.

Stewards and Weavers.  LCW views its board, staff, and key leaders as primary weavers and stewards of its network. It is their job to help it grow and develop, and create the systems and infrastructure it needs to flourish. They see a weaver as someone who is actively engaging and connecting people whom they meet to the network. At LCW, everyone who has “point of contact” duties is a weaver. Weavers are to be intentionally curious about people, their interests and connections; and to connect that person to LCW’s “hub” (i.e., its database and new member process) and at least one other thing going on in the network. As a team of weavers, they regularly help people navigate the network and make “weak linkages” to expand connections of value.

Letting Go.  LCW feels that in networks, connections naturally flow to value. All nodes, hubs or destinations, therefore, have to earn their place. If not, they should go away. The same is true also for the strategies, programs, and initiatives that LCW builds. In the traditional social service, community development, and community organizing fields, letting go can be very hard. LCW’s challenge was to create an environment where genuine choice could be exercised – where people have the information, the self-navigating capacity, and the access that come as close as possible to consumer choice. As LCW builds its network, it admits it faces a very large challenge – the ability to let go – to say something isn’t working and shouldn’t go on. So far, LCW has been successful in changing this dynamic. Along side this ability is the challenge of building feedback loops – listening systems and approaches – to show the “flow to value” in real time.

In less than five years, LCW has had many significant accomplishments. It credits these successes in a large part to the revolutionary way it has approached resident engagement. The strong constituency LCW has painstakingly created has led to many physical and financial successes. In this period, it has:
 
1. Raised more than $10 million in new investments for Lawrence neighborhoods.
 
2. Built 25 new affordable housing units (homeownership and rental) on eight vacant lots and abandoned buildings.
 
3. Built two new playgrounds.
 
4. Acquired an abandoned school and six other vacant parcels for future development of a community center, a 2½ acre park, and up to 50 more units of affordable housing.
 
5. Engaged more than 400 families in a wide range of Family Asset Building (FAB) programs and strategies, for both adults and youth.
 
6. Created the Reviviendo Gateway Initiative, a collaboration of residents, mill owners, small business people, elected officials, and agency heads to create a new vision for a redevelopment district in the heart of the city.
 
7. Organized and won a “Zoning Overlay District,” the first major zoning change in the city since 1946, that will stimulate investment in the mill district, allow for greater density of development in neighborhoods, and require an affordable housing component for all major residential development.
 
8. Created and implemented the five-month PODER Leadership Experience for resident leaders. Participants learn to develop their own power and learn new skills. The program is run in collaboration with Cambridge College, Interaction Institute for Social Change, the Right Question Project, and United for a Fair Economy.
 
9. Mounted organizing campaigns for affordable housing, against predatory lending, and for the clean up of city- and privately owned, abandoned land and alleyways.
 
10. Created the NeighborCircle campaign to stimulate relationship building and local action among neighbors in Lawrence’s diverse neighborhoods. Participants host and facilitate dinners where conversations about the community lead to direct action. Fourteen circles have been completed, leading to a range of outcomes including five new Property Improvement Committees (PICs) working on local issues.

• Executive Director Bill Traynor admits that the hardest lesson is letting go, even when it is a core belief. For example, in NeighborCircles, where residents get together to talk about issues and solutions, the natural tendency of staff is to want to prescribe the ending. Staff can see the potential possibilities and pitfalls, and it is natural to want to take charge. But they have had to learn over time how to recognize those impulses and let them go. As an organization, LCW remains committed to creating an environment where people truly own their own conversations and actions. It is not always an easy balance, but they all have grown more adept at letting go over time.
   
• This shift in organizational thought and behavior did not happen overnight. Lawrence was a community in crisis, which afforded the opportunity to try creative approaches to problem solving. But it takes time to develop a new approach and build a staff and board that buys-in to the method. Staff who normally would not have seen resident engagement as their responsibility had to come to see the value of it being everyone’s job.

Agency interview in January 2005 with: Bill Traynor, Executive Director