Community Leadership

Many rural places struggle to keep young people at home and to give them a reason to stay in the form of economic opportunity. Lafayette County in Missouri is one such locality and has taken a regional approach to the challenge. Corinne Estancia is the community economic development director for Lafayette County and a graduate of the community leadership development (CLD) program there. She credits this program and the people with whom she developed relationships with during it with the idea for the Old Trails Regional Tourism project.

The tourism project is intended to create new economic opportunity and builds on three natural and cultural assets of the region, which now includes part or all of ten counties in west central Missouri. First, historically, the region was the head of the Santa Fe Trail along the Missouri River, which was linked to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Several scenic byways are marked to steer tourist traffic to selected sites in the region. Second, it has a notable regional cuisine. Third, it has financial and technical assistance assets that target entrepreneurial development, especially — to build on the second asset — agritourism enterprises that use labels of origin as a primary marketing tool. In fact, it won a Stronger Economies Together program grant in 2010 from the US Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Administration.

Corinne is quick to point out that the Old Trails Regional Tourism project is fundamentally a regional collaboration success story grounded in the education she and several of her fellow leadership program participants undertook. They learned not only to identify and use these assets as a foundation for a development program, but also how to attract other partners to their purpose. They built relationships and gained political capital from local mayors, county commissioners, and state and federal elected officials. These relationships led to active support from funding and technical support agencies such as USDA Rural Development, the Missouri Economic Development Commission, and the Extension Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development program sponsored by University of Missouri Extension. The Old Trails project now boasts a membership base of over one hundred business and local government entities that span the region, including artisans, wineries, hospitality and travel enterprises, and agricultural producers.

The project's success can also be attributed to the partnership established among government agencies and businesses and maintained based on the shared purposes its mission defines and its governing board's leaders (who represent the different interest groups across the region) consistently emphasize. "We just keep at it," says Don Battey, who is president of the board. "Communication to potential partners and to the tourism marketplace is an important part of our strategy. Our speakers' bureau does a terrific job of telling people around the region about this project, its vision for the region and its successes to date." Battey also notes:

The leadership program in Lafayette County of which I was part gave me the tools, network, and confidence to reach beyond my own community to all those in the region and build relationships from a common point of reference, selling the idea on a sharing of interests that was bigger than any single community. That was not always an easy sell in rural Missouri, but I learned that you can't order people around in community work; instead you have to communicate your common interests and be consistent and enthusiastic about it. You also have to demonstrate that some influential people have committed political capital to the outcomes we want to achieve.

The strength of this partnership group was tested a few years ago when an agricultural producer wanted to establish a concentrated hog feeding operation close to a primary historic community along one a scenic byway. According to members of the partnership, this operation would have seriously affected the area's tourism by damaging the landscape. "The odors would have kept the tourists away, I'm sure," said Battey. The organization rallied other regional groups, the local people, and their elected representatives to pressure the producer to change its plans and to convince the relevant regulating agencies to deny a rezoning permit for property so close to the community.

Corinne and Don's experience demonstrates what we argue for in this volume. That is, de Tocqueville's Mother Science, which focused primarily on Americans' associational tendencies, is only a part of the "science" today. Getting together and convincing individuals and groups to work for a common cause must be coupled with leadership and political (or civic) engagement in order to be successful. Our research will demonstrate the central importance of civic engagement and social cohesion, created in the form of new associations and relationships, for achieving community change.

Increasing Community Capacity and Civic Engagement

The term "community capacity" often refers to the local ability to accomplish local change (Gittell and Vidal 1998). Some authors argue that high capacity means successful community organizing, which results in associational tendencies somewhat similar to those de Tocqueville outlined. Others argue that increasing capacity involves the ability to recognize and mobilize community assets (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). Still others find that community capacity-building is very similar to community development (Robinson and Green 2011). Regardless of the definition of community capacity-building in concept or operation, all seem to agree that this capacity is important for community change.

Civic (or political) engagement is also implicit in nearly all discussions about how to increase and use community capacity to change communities. Further, the authors above recognize that one of civic engagement's fundamental elements is leadership or leaders' ability to use this capacity for change. Without community leaders' demonstrated ability to mobilize resources, institutional leaders do not recognize citizens involved in change activities as having any influence or power to actually induce change, which neuters their "capacity." Effective community change requires civic engagement — direct involvement in publicly acknowledged work that produces desired community...