The social change role of community development corporations

Community-driven Social Change: This dissertation examines the dominant critique found in the literature that contemporary community development corporations (CDCs)have abandoned their 1960s commitment to empower poor communities. By asking CDC directors how their organizations accomplish social change and where their ideas about social change come from, this research seeks a more nuanced description of the transformative intent of their work. The practitioner perspectives generated by these interviews are then analyzed in the context of Post WWII new social movement theory in order to discover the conceptual basis for an alternative explanation for the social change role being played by today’s CDCs.