Governance and Comprehensive Community Initiatives: A Case Study of the PRYSE Coalition In Far Rockaway, New York, 2000-2004
Item
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Title
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Governance and Comprehensive Community Initiatives: A Case Study of the PRYSE Coalition In Far Rockaway, New York, 2000-2004
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:586579751515:10822
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identifier
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11142
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Creator
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Ronda, Michelle Ann,
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Contributor
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Paul Attewell
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Social research | Comprehensive community initiatives | Governance | Program evaluation | Rockaway peninsula | Safe Schools/Healthy Students | School violence
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Abstract
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The US response to urban poverty has shifted from a welfare-state model to market-based solutions---toward governance as arrangement of service partnerships among different federal and local agencies, contractors, philanthropies, community facilities, residents and businesses. Economic, political and fiscal pressures and shifting views of poverty, race, crime, health, and service have seen increased federal adoption of comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs). Originally devised by philanthropies, CCIs are cross-sectoral or cross-agency, multi-actor partnerships relying constitutively on social science-crafted, measurable evaluations of strategies and results; modern CCIs adopt an apolitical focus on best practices and forego explicit treatment of race, class or gender. One federal inter-agency program started in 1999, the Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) initiative of the Justice, Education and Health departments, targets school violence and youth health by requiring schools, health facilities, and local law and justice authorities to enter CCI-type coalitions as a condition of grant funding; these partnerships are expected to solicit community participation. This ethnographic case study of an SS/HS-funded CCI in the Rockaway peninsula of Queens, in which the author served as a program evaluator, finds mixed effects of federal requirements; obstacles in engaging community participation; and difficulties in leveraging one-time grant funding into sustainable structures. Roles of police, prosecutors, social workers, educators, mediators, evaluators and community groups are examined, illuminating divides of organizational mission and philosophy, profession, class, race, turf and residency. This gives rise to critiques of national trends in governance; community policing and justice; and evaluation politics. Two critical extremes are considered: Does implementation of community governance extend state authority by calling upon a community to condition itself, generating remote-control government, or do partnership models merely cover for abandonment of public ideals and obligations? Included are a sociology of Rockaway; a quantitative demographic survey of class and racial disparities and resident assessments of neighborhood issues; and findings of focus groups in which targeted Rockaway high school youths reflect on the meaning of safety and health in their lives and neighborhoods.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
