The ultimate raison d’être of CCIs is to “roll up” work at the neighborhood level to achieve community-level outcomes. While there is ample evidence that CCIs have been successful in engaging community residents, building local capacity and achieving small-scale results, those hoped-for large scale outcomes have proven more elusive to document. In part, that is due to the largely insurmountable methodological problem of attribution. No matter how sizeable the activities sponsored by a CCI, they are not the sole contributors to community change. Absent appropriate “control group” neighborhoods (virtually impossible to achieve in the real world) a definitive causal relationship between a CCI and community-level outcomes cannot be established.

But I suspect that the deeper challenge is one of dosage. No matter how many resources a CCI devotes to a neighborhood, the exposure of most residents to those interventions is likely to be limited. Time and again, we’ve observed a fairly small group become deeply engaged in the work of an Initiative, but achieving true community-wide mobilization requires massive concentrated resources (witness the recent presidential campaign). After all, as we often note, the scale of philanthropic dollars pales in comparison to public sector funding in those same communities. In which case, why do we expect our marginal dollars to catalyze large-scale changes?

Despite high expectations about “getting to scale,” CCIs have uncovered no magic formulas for turning promising programs into citywide practice. Given what we have learned about the need for intensive capacity building to support neighborhood-level change, a comparable urban-scale investment would be beyond the reach of private philanthropy. Absent new government funding streams (unlikely but not impossible), it will take significant political will to repurpose existing public funding to underwrite system wide innovation. Meanwhile, embattled public schools, health care and criminal justice systems are operating under duress in most major metropolitan areas, leaving them with little excess energy for public-private partnerships, no matter how promising.

There is also a fundamental paradox of expectations. Although we frequently note that the purpose of long-term investment in communities is to allow the complex, decidedly non-linear process of change to unfold over time, for some reason we continue to expect easy-to-measure, short-term linear outcomes. But if we are really seeking intervention at the level of “root causes,” shouldn’t the appropriate timeline be generational? It can take years just to get groups to work effectively together. Given the experience of some CCIs, it’s not unrealistic to expect that investment in a traditionally disenfranchised neighborhood may just begin to really pay off after ten years of concerted effort. But how many foundations have that kind of patience?

Tom David