Enhancing the Capacity of Community-Based Organizations in East St. Louis

This article describes the efforts of students and faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to strengthen the organizing, planning, and development capacity of community-based organizations seeking to enhance the quality of life in East St. Louis's poorest residential neighborhoods. The article demonstrates the effectiveness of the university's empowerment planning approach to capacity-building that integrates the concepts and methods of participatory action research, direct action organizing, and critical theory into a new paradigm for community planning. The article concludes with a preliminary assessment of the empowerment planning approach's effectiveness in capacity-building in East St. Louis.