National Coalition of STD Directors

What exactly is a Community-Based Organization, or more aptly a CBO?

 By far one of the best efforts to define a CBO is what Stephen Manning, former executive director of ACT, developed for the ACT Board Retreat in 1990.

Being community-based is not simply about where you are located and what your organization's legal status is. Being community-based means being: community-focused; community-motivated; community-rooted; community-identified.

Community
A community is really plural, a shifting coalition of smaller communities with complex relations among themselves. Talk of "the community" is shorthand at best; at worst, a mask for the diversity of communities that coalesce. But community is always specific: this, not that. The gay community is a good example..

Community-Focused
Being community-focused means aiming your attention and energy at the intersection point between persons and their social environment. In order to respond to one you have to respond to the other. Direct service has to include systemic advocacy. This is about change. This makes it political..

Community-Rooted
Being community-rooted means that the service-providers and the service-users mirror each other, are not "other" to each other. No matter what the role they play, they generally share an insider status that makes boundaries shift and makes organizational membranes porous. There are pros and cons here..

Stigma and Marginality
The roots of ACT's community lie in organizing around the issues of stigma and marginality, taking a despised difference and making it a creative identity. Belonging, power and pride are constant themes.
Our approach to education and support aims to turn a passive patient into an active health promoter, with other like themselves: belonging, power, and pride..

Community-Identified
Being community-identified means naming yourself in opposition to the "others": corporate, professional, and governmental sectors. A negative identity is not sufficient, though, especially when success makes you look more and more like the "others" you suspect..

Community-Specific
Being community-identified means being community-specific. You cannot represent everyone adequately. All identities are built on the claiming of one difference in opposition to other differences and identities. This imposes limitation and destroys the fantasy of universality. We are not everyone; we are not for everyone..

Cross-Identification
Being community-identified means being cross-identified. Our "community" actually is a coalition of many other "communities" to which we also belong. The primary organizing difference of queerness competes with cross-identities of gender, serostatus, class, race and ethnicity, education, age, spirituality, politics, language, sexual practice, sexual self-labelling, etc. Being community-focused on the intersection between personal existence and social environment means we can't ignore these. In the midst of passion, it requires tolerance..

Community-Motivated
Being community-motivated means that people who select involvement with ACT do so not primarily for professional or financial motives, bout out of personal passion. This provides initial energy and effort beyond our other resources. But maintaining it and coupling it with evaluation of organizational results presents a challenge..

Holistic Vision
Being community-motivated means perceiving the world from the perspectives of our primary community as a whole, being a special interest, and having very heavy "leakage" or cross-fertilization of concerns and values. Without lesbians' history of feminist analysis of health-care, and gay men's history of liberation analysis of sex, ACT would not be what it is.
We confront AIDS primarily as people who are ourselves affected and secondarily in our organizational roles. Our grief and our fear and our anger are communal and constant. We need our own services and resources..

Community-Owned
Being community-owned means being community-accountable. Though most of our funding comes from governments, we state that our accountability is not finally to them but to our "community". Visible and effective ownership of a community-based organization is a matter of control. And which mechanism/sector/group has primary control is a central question. Finally, who speaks and acts for the "community" to which we are finally accountable?