Survey of neighborhood-based, comprehensive community empowerment initiatives

There is a developing consensus among health educators and other public health specialists that successful programs--especially among low-income people--emerge from empowered communities that participate proactively in all phases of program planning, implementation, and evaluation. Yet, there is no consensus on the definition of empowerment or on the guidelines that successful community empowerment initiatives have followed. The author surveys 17 community empowerment initiatives based in neighborhoods representing the diversity of low-income communities--both rural and urban--throughout the country. The objective of the paper is to explore the ways different initiatives have defined and operationalized their commitment to community empowerment and to examine the implications of these data for health educators. In order to understand the varying effectiveness of the initiatives surveyed, the author compares them considering several variables:their history and neighborhood context, their planning process and structure, their goals and objectives, their strategies, their relationships to their funders, and their accomplishments.