Community Building

Why Community Building?

Despite a strong and respected community development infrastructure in the Twin Cities, as well as an engaged and robust philanthropic community, low-income people of color and immigrants show persistent disparities along all socio-economic indicators. At Nexus we believe this gap exists because, while there are those within these communities who are able to capitalize on existing community development opportunities, there are many more who do not benefit from conventional community development efforts.

To reach these most isolated and disadvantaged communities, Nexus helps put in place highly targeted community building strategies that address the unique factors – including culture, language, family and personal background – that often lead to a person’s inability to take advantage of existing opportunities and resources. 

What is Community Building?

Community building strategies include culturally-specific outreach, education, organizing, civic participation and community engagement tools that engage those who are otherwise excluded from neighborhood revitalization efforts. These highly targeted strategies also connect residents to other individuals, groups and networks, including those who are engaged in collective action to improve conditions in their neighborhoods. 

Nexus recognizes that the work of Community Building - developing a community’s social, human, and cultural capital infrastructure - must also be linked to the development of a community’s physical and economic infrastructure. Community building strategies complement and strengthen conventional community development approaches, which is why community building is increasingly recognized as essential to the achievement of more equitable and sustainable community revitalization.

Nexus connects high impact Community Building strategies to effective mainstream community and economic development activities in order to achieve more sustainable and equitable development in the communities we work in.    

Nexus sees both Community Building and Community Development as two critical complementary aspects of neighborhood revitalization, and key to ending long-term poverty.

What is Nexus’s role?

Nexus has established a distinctive role in the emerging field of community building:

• Addressing racial disparities in revitalization by ensuring that low-income residents can develop the skills to build assets and access supportive services

• Promoting and modeling inclusion and cultural competence as prerequisites for equitable, sustainable community revitalization

• Innovating participatory tools such as engagement, culturally-based outreach and education tools to reach low-income people of color and immigrants

• Becoming a “mini-think tank” for identifying unseen community issues, particularly the needs and resources of culturally and socially isolated constituencies

• Incubating “engaged” community building models that are spun off and brought to scale by intermediaries and other partners to expand social impact