More than 30 practitioners, policy experts and funding agency representatives gathered in Omaha, Nebraska, early this summer for a two-day facilitated conversation on cluster-based community capacity building. The conference was organized by the Heartland Center in partnership with the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development and the Rural Policy Research Institute.

“...intentional community capacity building increases community positive outcomes, including improvements in social capital, human capital, natural capital and financial capital and clustered community capacity building is more effective and efficient than single community efforts.”

Dr. Cornelia Flora, Director
North Central Regional Center for Rural Developement

A conference agenda, with lots of interaction among participants, was built around two assumptions, according to Dr. Cornelia Flora, director of North Central. Those assumptions, she said, include a conviction that “intentional community capacity building increases community positive outcomes, including improvements in social capital, human capital, natural capital and financial capital.” A second assumption is that “clustered community capacity building is more effective and efficient than single community efforts.”

Participants in the conference, who traveled from 19 states, Washington DC and Canada, were selected specifically because of their interest in or experience in multi-community collaboration that results in enhanced community capacity. The agenda included sessions to:

Share experiences, including successes and failures, in community clustering.
Capture lessons from those experiences.
Synthesize obstacles and opportunities.
Brainstorm elements of a model for clustering.
Suggest questions that a national research project might address to measure the impacts on this type of community capacity building in the years after the clustering took place.

Findings from the conference will be posted on North Central’s web site, which is www.ncrcrd.iastate.edu, according to Dr. Flora.

The conference was organized with support from USDA/CSREES, the Northwest Area Foundation, RUPRI, the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, and the Heartland Center.

Charles Fluharty, RUPRI executive director, said he hopes the conference begins a national dialog that will affect policy initiatives that encourage more bottom-up community collaboration in rural development. Heartland Center Co-Directors Vicki Luther and Milan Wall said many of the themes discussed at the conference were consistent with the objectives of the Center’s national project called Strengthening the Rural-Urban Connection, which encourages greater communication between inner-city community activists and rural community developers.