CASE STUDY: COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

In 1999, Beth Tucker, Coconino Extension Director/Educator at the University of Arizona in Flagstaff and a long time Innovation Center partner, approached the Hopi Reservation Village Center to discuss partnership. “We wanted to explore the impact of cultural values and cultural experiences in mobilizing a community project,” recalls Tucker. She had worked with Native American Tribes in the past and would serve as Innovation Center liaison for the project.

The Village Center had recently come up with a community vision and agreed to partner with the Innovation Center in launching a community-wide discussion about how to bring their vision to life. “We were there to facilitate, remain open, and learn about their approach to youth development,” explains Tucker.

For a year and a half the Innovation Center and Village Center worked and strategized together. In an unexpected turn, tribal authorities shut down the Village Center and everyone’s efforts to build the community became much more urgent.

“The organization—which had been running great programs and services—was set loose to die or rise from the ashes,” recalls Tucker, who met with the now unpaid staff and community volunteers in her office to plan their next move. “We used a dream cloud activity from the Building Community Tool Kit to discover what we wanted to see happen.”

What they forged from the ashes is now a thriving, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, called Pu’tavi, that serves not just one village, but everyone on Hopi. “Forming a 501(c)(3) is almost unheard of in Native communities,” says Tucker. “Already, Pu’tavi is well known and respected as an organization that gets things done.”

With seed money, training, and technical assistance from the Innovation Center, Pu’tavi established its independence from Hopi government and has made dramatic contributions to the economic well being and community life of Hopi. Pu’tavi offers computer classes to staff, community artisans, and families, and has sponsored training on youth safety and protection for youth development workers on the reservation, including Head Start representatives, bus drivers, and health workers. In 2003, Pu’tavi sponsored it third annual art show, attended by people from as far away as Japan, to provide Hopi artists a forum for showing and selling their work. The organization’s most radical effort has been Innovation Center-led leadership training for young men and women with the implied agreement they will join the Village Cultural Board—only elders have held leadership positions in the past and females have never before been permitted to serve on the board.

“The Innovation Center partnership with Pu’tavi demonstrates the power of recognizing and building on a community’s assets,” says Tucker, who notes that strong community and family feeling, commitment to family and clan, and patience sustained this project and its advocates through difficult times. “Pu’tavi demonstrates that when communities are ready to do something, they do it.”

The partnership and generous involvement of Pu’Tavi, community members on HOPI, and many other individuals and partners contributed to the widely used Innovation Center publication, Building Community: A Tool Kit for Youth and Adults in Charting Assets and Creating Change.

PROJECTS

Building Community is a carefully structured but flexible process in which youth and adults work as partners to examine community resources, develop a community vision, and take action to create meaningful change. Research and experience suggests-and our partnerships confirm-that including the input and participation of various sectors of the community in the planning and implementation processes leads to a dramatic shift from a traditional leader/organizer approach to one that allows many community members to engage in the work. Developed in partnership with organizations across the United States, Building Community is guided by three core principles:

• Youth-adult partnerships: Create equal partnerships between young people and adults where decision-making authority is shared.
• An asset-based approach: Focus on the gifts of a community’s past, place, and relations, as well as the gifts of individual community members.
• Learning and reflection: Be intentional about where we have been and where we are going, bringing together what was revealed and learned.

Charting Community Connections brought the Innovation Center together with Native American communities to map assets, reconnect with traditional languages and customs, and strengthen the communities. With support from the Innovation Center and local partners, community groups in the Hopi and Flathead Indian (Salish and Kootenai) Reservations in Arizona and Montana identified language rejuvenation, cultural preservation, and culturally appropriate economic development as priorities. With the Innovation Center, these groups worked towards these priorities by strengthening community outreach, staff development, organizational management, and youth-adult partnerships. The project generated a better understanding of how to promote youth and community development in rural, Native American communities. The Innovation Center translated this knowledge into practical strategies that are useful to community-based organizations, the Cooperative Extension System, and national intermediary organizations.