The United States is blessed with abundant resources, wealth and dynamism, and yet burdened with profound social and environmental ills.“We can put a man on the moon,” goes the old saw, but why can’t we empower distressed communities and groups to help understand and address their own problems? The answer, it turns out, is not that no one knows how to facilitate such empowerment; the organizations examined in this study do it every day. The answer is that we aren’t properly investing the resources readily available for building the social infrastructure--a nationwide community research system--that would make empowerment-through-mutual-learning universally accessible.

“Community-based research” is research that is conducted by, with, or for communities (eg, with civic, grassroots, or worker groups throughout civil society). This research differs from the bulk of the research and development (R&D) conducted in the United States, most of which--at a total cost of about $170 billion per year--is performed on behalf of business, the military, the federal government, or in pursuit of the scientific and academic communities’ intellectual interests.