Background

The City of Chicago and not-for-profit Green Street Project co-founded the Community Building Initiative of Chicago in autumn 2006 as a public/private sector alliance. Sean Harden, a cabinet-level community-liaison to Mayor Daley, serves as the Initiative’s Chair. Green Street Project serves as the Initiative’s project lead and fiscal agent. The Initiative aims to support the community-building efforts of nonprofits, faith-based organizations (FBOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), government agencies, businesses and individuals, through capacity building and by establishing and strengthening connections among them. As its first project, the Community Building Initiative collaborated with hundreds of community leaders, who determined a user-generated, community-networking website needed to be developed. Under the auspices of the Initiative, Green Street Project pledged to construct and operate CitizenPowered.org. The website is currently focused on Chicago, but is being created so that it can grow across the country to where it is needed. CitizenPowered features user-generated content focused on community building. Users will be able to make public pledges for how they will make their community and the environment more sustainable. Users, both individuals or organizations, can connect with one another, compare assets and needs, collaborate towards shared goals, post event dates, write stories, classify one another’s postings, etc.

Building Social Capital

One of the main objectives of CitizenPowered.org is to build the social capital (defined as the number, quality and utility of social networks)—of communities. Social capital is the building block of communities. It is the relationships within communities and across communities that help everything from neighborhood watches to job training programs to wetlands preservation happen. Every community has social capital, and nearly every community has gaps that social capital can help fill.

Building CitizenPowered.org

The process of building the website is, in itself, a story of community-development. GreenStreetProject spent one year developing the website and leveraged grassroots enthusiasm with the convening power of Mayor Daley's Office to secure $1 million worth of in-kind resources from a variety of community partners.

Pixelgate Media designed the site. Hosting is provided by onShore Networks. IBM provided the servers to run the site. Mandatek provided technology advice. Gerald Jenkins, principal with the law firm Goldberg Kohn and board chairman of Green Street Project, provided cash and guidance. CitizenPowered.org is built on the Drupal platform. Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("General Public License") that is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.