It’s Time to Step Aside: A 2026 Call for Boldness in Community Work
At the start of 2025, a conversation kept echoing in my head: we need to stop “programatizing” community. It captures something that has long bothered me about how we approach community work. For decades, we have treated communities as things to be programmed, managed, or fixed. We build projects and design interventions around organizational mandates, program performances, outcomes, and success stories.
What if we stopped thinking of community as a project and started seeing it as a living, breathing web of relationships, belonging, and shared responsibility?
When we measure change through the lens of organizational impact rather than community growth, we risk mistaking activity for transformation. This old way of doing community work, while well-intentioned, was built on narrow presumptions about who holds knowledge, power, and agency. It prioritized services and programs, emphasized helping rather than partnering, and relied on deficit narratives. Leadership was external and prioritized services, fixing problems instead of amplifying local strengths. Twenty years ago, community development was often rooted in charity and needs-based thinking.
I know this pattern because I lived it. I drafted grants, designed the programs, delivered the services, and strived to reach as many people as possible. While there were bright spots along the way, the deeper change I worked towards never fully took hold. Programs ended when funding ended. Participation was surface-level. People came to receive something, not to co-create it. Increasing effort saw very little lasting change.
Over the last five years, I’ve watched the field evolve. Thankfully, I am beginning to see a shift. More organizations are now starting to look towards community development rooted in assets, not deficits. We are learning to ask not, “what’s broken?”, but “what’s here that we can start strong with?” We are beginning to see people in our communities as leaders. We learned during COVID that communities collectively were able to adapt and overcome challenges faster than organizations or governments could. Seeing communities step up in that moment made something impossible to ignore; when barriers were removed, when urgency replaced bureaucracy, and when people trusted one another, community did not wait they led it. That raised a deeper, more uncomfortable question for me. Why does community need permission to do community work?
I have heard it in stories from grassroots leaders, who must seek approval to run local events or apply for funding. I have seen it amongst institutions who decide which communities are “ready” to lead. I have seen it in professionals, who frame capacity-building as something we give to others rather something that already exists and need only be recognized.
When we assume people cannot do for themselves, we disempower them. When we make them wait for permission to act, we slow momentum and silence the leadership that community development is meant to nurture.
We are also seeing growing demand for collaboration between residents, grassroots groups, organizations, and institutions. Collaboration that holds community voice and leadership as central, not optional. The principles of Asset-Based Community Development remind us that everyone has something to contribute.
Two shifts give me hope:
• Systems thinking shows us how housing, food, health, belonging, and power are deeply connected. Movements for reconnection and social stability are urging us to look deeper and question who is leading, and whose voices are considered credible. Ideas like community-led governance, network building, and regenerative thinking are no longer buzzwords. These are markers of a larger shift in how we understand the work of building community.
• Building new groups from the beginning. We used to talk about inclusion as inviting people to the current table. We now understand that if the table was built without past and present experience, it still belongs to someone else. Real present experiences build new tables — spaces where people are part of the design from the very beginning, shaping the work rather than reacting to it. This means slowing down, letting go of control, and trusting community-led processes that may not fit neatly into strategic plans or logic models. It is not simple work, but it is the work that creates genuine belonging.
My hope for 2026 is that we take bolder steps in this direction. That those of us who hold institutional power learn when to step aside and not always having to be the lead. That we enter communities with humility and build in exit strategies so local leadership can thrive, leaving behind capacity rather than dependency.
That we measure success not by how many programs we run, but by how much power communities reclaim for themselves. The future of community work isn’t about scaling up programs — it’s about knowing which ones no longer need us. It’s about deepening relationships and redistributing trust.
As we move into 2026, I invite those of us working in community development, government, or non-profits to pause and reflect: What tensions are you holding in your practice right now? What ideas or frameworks have challenged or changed how you work? And what bold steps are you willing to take in 2026 to support communities truly lead their own change?
We have both an opportunity and a responsibility, to move from comfort to courage — from mechanization to possibility. Community does not need our permission to exist. It needs our partnership, our humility, and our belief that people already hold the wisdom, gifts, and power to shape the places they call home.