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Comprehensive Community Development Process <br />Comprehensive Community Development is designed to bolster efforts to improve quality of life, spur community building and guide dramatic <br />transformation of a community that is facing challenges. It does so by capturing the vision of residents, turning goals into meaningful and <br />measurable actions, and attracting the support of community development actors in implementing a resident- defined vision for the future of <br />their community. <br />Three overarching concepts, each of which is essential to comprehensive community development, separate this approach from traditional <br />community development approaches: <br />• Comprehensive Community Development is holistic in nature. Too often, community reinvestment efforts have been planned and <br />executed without sufficient attempts to understand other efforts made by separate community development actors working to improve the <br />very same communities. The result is often a scattered, patchwork approach that does not harness the collective energies and abilities of the <br />many community economic development actors working in a particular geography. A coordinated, holistic approach by those community <br />development actors already working within a community yields an impact that is greater than the sum of the many parts than could <br />otherwise be achieved. <br />• Comprehensive Community Development is based in a community's insets. Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) is a <br />philosophy championed by community development scholars Jody Kretzman and John McKnight The nature of their research demonstrates <br />that every community has innumerable assets in its people, social networks, institutional actors, physical assets, and modes of exchange that <br />should be the foundational basis for any community reinvestment effort Too often, communities are seen as being made up of issues or <br />problems that need to be 'fixed' rather than dynamic places of strength that needs to be harnessed. Comprehensive community <br />development recognizes the assets that exist in communities and supports the further development of those assets to support a basis of all <br />community building efforts. <br />Comprehensive Community Development is resident -led. Community revitalization and reinvestment efforts are only successful when <br />hundreds or thousands of private individuals, acting in their own interem make a private choice to invest in the future of their community; <br />and while public and non - profit actors can take any number of actions to support the work of private individuals to improve their <br />community, community revitalization only occurs when individual residents and business owners make the choice to invest in the future of <br />their community. Too often, community reinvestment efforts do not achieve their anticipated outcomes because the good faith efforts made <br />by actors within the community development arena fail to stimulate private residents and business owners to invest in their community; and <br />many times, this is because the vision being implemented is not the vision of the residents but of the individual institutional actors. To <br />achieve the fullest impact, a resident -led vision is needed to direct the efforts of the other actors that in turn will drive private decisions to <br />invest in community. <br />30 <br />