Exploring Social Capital and Civic Engagement to Create a Framework for Community Building

Community building is emerging as an increasingly important intervention strategy for neighborhood revitalization efforts across the country. This article proposes a framework that models 5 components that the author argues comprise the community building process: resident engagement, agenda building, community organizing, community action, and communications and message development. The article is intended to make community building more comprehensible as a field of work and study and more replicable as an intervention strategy.