Community Capacity

The well-being of a community involves more than education, employment and other static measures of individual well-being. Well-being is also influenced by opportunities available to residents and individuals successfully taking advantage of them. The opportunities that community residents have are shaped by personal conditions and their community. As a general rule, for example, one who is in poverty will have fewer opportunities than one who is not. But support services and networks available for those in poverty in one community are likely to lead to more opportunities than those in poverty in another community without such services and networks will have. All else being equal, the person in poverty with these additional opportunities has a greater likelihood of improved well-being.

This well-being assessment includes an analysis of the collective ability of residents to create opportunities and take advantage of those that they have in light of local needs and desires. These opportunities and the ability to develop them are part of community capacity (See Kusel, 1996 for further discussion of the concept).

Community capacity is the collective ability of residents in a community to respond to external and internal stresses, to create and take advantage of opportunities, and to meet the needs of residents, diversely defined. It consists of three broad categories: physical capital, human capital and social capital.

Community capacity was assessed for the community aggregations based on local expert knowledge developed through a series of ten local workshops held in each of the nine counties in the Klamath Province. Two workshops were held in Humboldt County due to the high number and geographic dispersion of aggregations.

The number of participants in each workshop ranged from 5 to 18, depending on the area and the number of aggregations addressed. To ensure a diversity of perspectives in workshop discussions, participants were selected from a variety of backgrounds. Included were those individuals who — by nature of their profession, local involvement, or history of residence — are knowledgeable about the physical, human, and social capital of most of the communities within each workshop's area of focus. Participants included, but were not limited to, planners and planning commissioners, community development professionals, current and former county supervisors, education administrators, business people, health and human service providers, and long-term residents with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

To ensure consistency in the information gathered, the following process was used in each workshop.

The creation, composition and general charge of the Klamath Province Social Assessment were introduced to the group.
The entire social assessment methodology was reviewed, including a brief introduction to the analysis units and the concepts of well-being and community capacity.
The process for determining the capacity of community block group aggregations within the workshop's area of interest was outlined.
The block group aggregations for the area of interest were reviewed by the group for appropriateness. In some cases, alterations were made to the aggregations.
The concept of community capacity was reintroduced and defined in more detail.
Participants were asked to indicate the various community aggregations with which they are most knowledgeable and familiar. Based on their responses, assignments were made to individual participants to ensure that each aggregation was assessed by two different people (though in one case, limited expert knowledge and a limited number of experts led to only one assessment for an aggregation). Participants were asked to complete a separate community capacity worksheet (see Appendix) for each aggregation including: a narrative assessment of capacity and a rating of capacity on a seven point scale ranging from very low to very high. In assessing capacity, participants were asked to consider the level of physical, human, and social capital in the communities within each aggregation.
The individual capacity rankings for each aggregation were summarized and anonymously presented to the group for review. During a facilitated group discussion the capacity ratings for each aggregation were discussed, there was further elaboration of issues relating to capacity for each aggregation, and a final capacity ranking was determined by the group for each aggregation.

Information gathered from each workshop includes individual community block group aggregation narratives and capacity rankings, final group capacity rankings, and notes from the facilitated discussion of all aggregations. The results of each workshop were reviewed to ensure the capacity rankings and related discussions were consistent with other workshops. In most workshops, experts proved reluctant to apply the highest and lowest capacity ratings on the seven point capacity scale, and very few aggregations actually received either a 1 or a 7. To ensure greater consistency in the analysis across the study, the scale was collapsed to a 5 point range with scores of 1 and 2 forming the lowest capacity score and scores of 6 and 7 forming the highest.