Collective Action, Collective Impact and Community Foundations: The Emerging Role of Local Institution Building in an Era of Globalization and Declining Social Safety Nets

In the neoliberal era social welfare policy has experienced a variety of strains due to the growing competition of global markets. The result is that federal safety nets seem to be receding just as local communities find themselves most in need and facing worldwide dynamics that seem to shift the locus of control well beyond their geographic borders. In response, some communities have looked to the tools of the past for answers while others have explored the potential for new tools that can help local communities survive within and respond to global trends. In this paper I explore three types of local movements that have been gaining popularity, sometimes in tandem with each other and other times on their own. Collective action, collective impact, and community foundations have all been implicated as potential responses to federal welfare state retrenchment. In the following pages I first explore this national and international paradigm of neoliberal safety net restructuring as it presently manifests itself within the United States. I then explore for each of these approaches how they have been implicated in this welfare state retrenchment and what their approach looks like both theoretically and concretely on the ground in local communities. Finally, I explore how each of these three approaches, when deployed in concert with each other can be seen to offer critical components that address one another’s major shortcomings. While it is not likely that, even taken together, these three increasingly popular approaches can backfill the retrenchment of federal governments, they can serve as a starting place for reasserting the importance of local self-determination within a global future.