336 Ecological Restoration and Design
Self-help model
The self-help model emphasizes process: people within the community working
together to arrive at group decisions and taking actions to improve their commu-
nity. The process builds civic capacity for collective action to move toward a shared
vision for the future of the community. In this model of community development,
the aim is not so much to complete a particular project as to institutionalize a
process of change based on building community institutions and strengthening
community relationships to work toward desired future conditions. The New
Richland golf course contains major elements of self-help community develop-
ment because putting it into place involved reinforcing patterns of community
interaction, cooperation and decision making. The change agents, the school
superintendent and his wife, acted as facilitators for community input rather than
sources of infinite knowledge about golf courses. People viewed the development
of the golf course as something they had decided together rather than as the result
of the best technical advice. The people involved in New Richland were definitely
middle class. Both those who play golf and those who have the means to contrib-
ute equipment or invest in shares in a community corporation tend to be better
off. And the community has developed new ways of working together to bring
about an improved, shared future.
It took a while to instigate the golf course project due to the large number of
meetings required to obtain everyone’s input, form the appropriate committees
and respond to each committee’s reports and suggestions. Yet once the golf course
was established, it easily became part of the public agenda in terms of local par-
ticipation in running it and in convincing city government to participate in its
maintenance.
However, if the New Richland project had been a purely self-help effort, the
initiators would have begun with a more diffuse goal, such as increasing recrea-
tional opportunities in the community. The decision to build a golf course – or an
alternative recreational facility, such as a lighted softball diamond – would have
been part of the process rather than the reason for devising the process. There are
a number of assumptions about the nature of rural communities behind the self-
help model (discussed by Littrell and Hobbs, 1989). When these assumptions
about the structure of the community are wrong, self-help as a strategy will be dif-
ficult to implement. These assumptions include these: (1) that communities’
members have a similarity of interest and that community development involves
building consensus, (2) that generalized participation and democratic decision
making within the community are necessary and possible, and (3) that the com-
munity has a degree of autonomy such that community actors can in fact influence
the community’s destiny.
A central assumption in the self-help model of community development is
that communities are homogeneous and based on consensus. In fact, despite the
norm of ‘we’re all just folks’ endorsed in many rural communities, most communi-
ties have increasing disparities in income and access to other resources. Thus,