The Promise of Comprehensive Community Development: Ten Years of Chicago's New Communities Program

Developed by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of Chicago (LISC Chicago) as a way of promoting comprehensive community development among local groups, NCP is one of the largest single-city efforts to help develop local capacity, partnerships, and resources. (Box ES.1 defines the key terms associated with these efforts.) Although NCP continues in Chicago, this report is focused on the first 10 years of MacArthur's support for the program. This fourth and final report on the first 10 years of NCP describes the guiding principles behind the initiative, the extent to which it achieved its goals, the challenges it faced, and the implications of these challenges and successes for similar initiatives. As a flagship example of a significant comprehensive community initiative (CCI) -- and one that has served as a model for recent federal policy -- the NCP experience offers important lessons for the next generation of placebased CCIs