San Antonio College Library

Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these...

A guide to community organizing, for empowering people to be their own leaders and to create genuine democratic politics and progressive change in our country.

Fuller's seventh book about Habitat for Humanity primarily tells the stories of people whose lives have been changed by its work. The stories' subjects include volunteer workers on the houses the world-spanning project builds and those who eventually occupied the 'simple, decent' homes. Fuller presents the stories in thematic chapters on how Habitat's work has enhanced children's lives, transformed entire families, created neighborhoods, launched...

"This book explores the promise and limits of bottom-up, grass-roots strategies of community organizing, development, and planning as blueprints for successful revitalization and maintenance of urban neighborhoods. Peterman proposes conditions that need to be met for bottom-up strategies to succeed. Successful neighborhood development depends not only on local actions, but also on the ability of local groups to marshal resources and political will...

"Challenges current notions of space and distance, helping us learn to appreciate and cultivate proximity. A follow-up to Visualizing Density (2007), this book illustrates 12 North American urban neighborhoods of approximately 125 acres each with hundreds of street-level photographs. Discusses factors of urban form that boost walking and transit use. Visualizes a low-carbon environment in smaller increments and shows how compact development can take...

In this title, the authors argue that death of community is being caused by contemporary policies that, if not changed, will continue to foster the decline of community.