Starting and Leading Neighborhood Associations

This page helps you decide on organizational structure--temporary or permanent, simple or elaborate, casual or formal. If you decide to move forward, we'll help you master the essential points. We point out some trivia that people will try to impose on you that really is optional at first.

Usually the organizing idea comes up when someone wants to socialize more with their neighbors or when there are problems larger than one household or pair of households can resolve. On this page, we'll refer to the initial problem or group of problems that cause you to think of starting a neighborhood organization as the "first issue."

Deciding Whether to Start a Group

• How many people are affected by the first issue?

• Are these people resident property owners, renters, business owners, business customers, or institutional stakeholders such as non-profit or faith-based groups?

• How motivated are these different groups to help solve the immediate problem or problems to which your group is reacting?

• If many residents are transient, meaning people don't stay in your community very long (more than 20% turnover a year, for example, is significant), how much effort can you expect from those folks?

• If renters or even fast-turnover homeowners form a large component of the population, are there any special circumstances that would make them likely to help? (Examples might be that the first issue affects them more than it affects long-term residents, or perhaps the "transients" are college students at an institution with an appetite for activism.)

• How passionate about your first issue are those who are likely to help?

• Are you, or someone you know and can identify right now, able to give the new organization the time and leadership effort it will require?

• Are you certain that no existing organization can be redirected or revived to tackle your first problem? Even if you have your doubts about an existing organization's strength, starting a new organization is both work intensive and potentially divisive if there is an organization available that you might work within.

Estimating the time and effort that will be required is a key factor in whether your venture into creating some type of neighborhood or community organization will be time well spent. Factors to consider are:

• Are the people you are working with "joiners"? Do they readily belong to interest-based clubs, faith-based organizations, political groups, civic groups, sports leagues, or organized social activities? If so, your job will be easier than if "people stay pretty much to themselves."

• Do neighbors have at least a passing acquaintance with each other already? If not, the first activity needs to include a getting acquainted component.

• Is there trust in the community, which will make your job will be easier, or is the community divided into factions or riddled with crimes that make people suspicious of one another?

• Is the "first issue" compelling? In other words, regular gunfire may be more compelling than noise from boom boxes.

• Is the "first problem" something that people will be at least slightly optimistic about solving? People often feel totally helpless to stop regular gunfire if that activity is gang-related or drug-related, as seems likely. So they may be too cynical or too fearful of becoming involved, even though the issue is enormously compelling.

• Is there a history of failed attempts at starting an organization, whether temporary or permanent? If there have been four fizzles in the last five years, your chances of success are low.

• Is there enough discontent to inspire loyalty to an organization? In suburban settings that are idyllic, except for one or two issues, people are simply too content and too busy to devote energy to resolving one or two problems that may seem minor or too difficult to solve.

• Is there a natural, comfortable, and neutral meeting place? If so, it will be easier to convince people to attend meetings.

Starting a Second or Third Neighborhood Association

Try not to form a rival organization simply because you are a personal or political rival of the leader of the other organization. Think of your community first. But a new organization is preferable to an ineffective one.

Inviting Neighbors to Organize

Strategize about whether you are initiating a brief campaign or a permanent organization. The longer the life of the organization you want to create, the more effort you want to devote to building potential supporters into a committee that will make the first invitation. Make it widely representative of the types of people you would like to see involved.

If you are threatened with a bad development now and will need to plan how to fight city hall in the next month or so, it's better to risk being perceived as egotistical to get the ball rolling quickly.

To invite people to the first meeting, make some flyers, knock on the doors, or put out the phone calls. State your best case first--what is the most urgent problem, excluding things over which people may feel completely powerless. If you have the budget, obviously you could do a mailer to each home. This may be the most realistic strategy in rural areas.

Keep the problem statement simple; a list of 25 issues won't attract as many people as a list of 3 issues that seem the most widespread and obvious in their effects.

Conducting Neighborhood Meetings

The chairperson also should command enough respect to call an end to unproductive discussions by postponing them to a future time, simply saying that enough discussion has occurred and calling for a vote, or assigning the matter to a committee.

It's useful to prepare an agenda for each meeting. It gives the president a bit of permission to gently move the meeting back on course if topics not ripe for discussion or decision making are wasting time.

The most important point about an agenda is to try to set up a correct expectation about whether something on the list is an action item where a decision is expected, a discussion, or a brainstorming. Select verbs that say what you mean.

The First Meeting of Your Neighborhood Group

If your neighborhood association is short term and single issue-driven, the get acquainted question is to ask people how they feel about or heard about the issue.

For the first meeting and every subsequent meeting, try to have an ideal outcome of the meeting in mind. Whether or not you share this outcome with the group depends on its nature. It could be a decision-making outcome or process outcome. For example, if you have a process outcome, such as "Everyone will feel they have an opportunity to speak about the crime problem if they want to," you can share that with the group at the beginning of the meeting.

At the first meeting, be sure to discuss how others perceive the first issue. Give people who differ time to express themselves. Secondly, discuss whether a permanent or temporary group seems most appropriate.

Expectations for Early Meetings

(We should admit that if your first meeting was terrible, you might not be forming a neighborhood association after all.)

This "second meeting" picture is likely to carry over from meeting to meeting for the first several meetings. Your attendance will be steady and stable only when the cause is "right-sized" in terms of being slightly challenging but not overwhelming, and/or when the socializing becomes pleasant enough that people come just to interact with neighbors.

Our next most important observations about meetings include:

1. Food and drink certainly help attract a crowd.

2. Keep the meeting a reasonable length, not more than an hour and a half.

3. To deal with a few people dominating the meeting, rely on the group. When the dominator comes up for a breath, the leader can say quickly, "And what do the rest of you think?" If this doesn't work, you'll have to impose time limits per person.

The Balance Between Community Assets and Community Problems

Pay attention to the opinion of professionals in urban issues, community development, housing, rural development, or whatever is appropriate in your case. If they are pessimistic about your chances, ask "why" to every pessimistic assertion they make. Just as individuals often defy the odds, so do communities.

Neighborhood Officers

But whether you need a vice-president, secretary, and treasurer depends on your game plan. You don't need a treasurer until you have money, and you don't need a secretary until you want to write letters or take minutes. Sometimes the secretary is called the recorder. If you did not elect a vice-president and the president needs to be absent, you can either change the meeting date or ask someone to substitute on a one-time basis. Just think before you act automatically.

Consider the term of office carefully too. If you are a new neighborhood association, you may want to ask for only a six-month commitment, which allows graceful replacement of those whose enthusiasm cools.

In urban neighborhoods, it is often very effective to have a block-level structure under the main neighborhood association. These block captains, as they frequently are called, can be a point of contact for the neighbors who have questions about the organization, complaints that the organization might take up, or intelligence for the group.

Naming Your Organization

If the name of your neighborhood is not established and people call it different things or have never conceived of your particular boundaries as a neighborhood, your problem is more difficult. First work on naming and defining borders for the neighborhood, and then find a name for the neighborhood association.

Neighborhood Group Membership

If you want to offer memberships with dues or a requirement for service or some other type of non-monetary contribution, that certainly is legitimate as well. You might have an associate membership for those who won't pay dues for your neighborhood association.

Budgets for Neighborhood Associations

Usually when finances become predictable, officers are allowed to make spending decisions for small amounts of money.

By-Laws and Incorporation

At the most basic level, by-laws state the name and purpose of the organization, its mailing address, list the officers (not by name, by office), and tell how the officers are selected, for what length of time they serve, and the duties and powers of each office.

If there is a board of directors, the number of directors, how they are selected, how long they serve, and whether their terms are staggered is specified. By-laws also describe how one becomes a member. If there are to be dues, the by-laws may say the dues are set by the neighborhood association or by what process, and how often they may be changed. Also the by-laws may state how often meetings are held or a minimum number of meetings per year.

Incorporating a neighborhood association implies permanence. Most neighborhood associations will be non-profit corporations. This does not mean that the group cannot make a profit on an individual activity; it does mean that the purpose of the association is not to make a profit. Profits can be held indefinitely and allowed to grow through investments, but the non-profit purpose must be stated clearly in the articles of incorporation.

A neighborhood association can exist for a long time without incorporation, but incorporating offers the same advantages to community associations that it offers to a business: officers probably will not be sued as individuals, if you have form a non-profit corporation your "profits" from a carnival cannot be taxed, and so forth.

Mission and Vision Statements

Some experts try to distinguish between a mission statement and a vision statement, but for neighborhoods, it isn't worth the effort to argue with someone who has a strong preference for which one you have, and strong ideas about which is which.

Nevertheless, a good galvanizing statement is one that is specific about what is to be done and when. For example, "to put a man on the moon in this decade and return him safely to the earth." Or "to reduce violent crime by two-thirds in the next two years." Or "to convince City Hall within the next year to install a rain garden in every block."

Single-Issue or Campaign Organizations

Build up the outcome or the goal, making it as specific as possible so that the neighborhood association can really visualize it. Examples of a specific goal with a visual component are:

• Our neighborhood would be so safe that people would take walks in the neighborhood after dark again.

• Every storefront would be filled with a customer-oriented business.

• Every vacant residential lot will be developed into a new residence.

• Every person in the neighborhood who wants to work will be employed.

Notice that the goals need not be entirely "realistic"--they may be idealistic as long as they are not laughable. It is probably not realistic that there will never again be a code violation in your neighborhood, but that goal also would be fairly easy for people to picture.

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