“The search for better ways to make necessary changes is often prompted by disappointments that result from conventional wisdom,” begins David Mathews second chapter in “For Communities to Work” talking about the ways that communities try to solve problems.

Mathews describes an almost formula way that communities address major issues.

1. A community cuts the problem down to a manageable size.
2. It finds a plausible solution.
3. It delegates responsibility to an accountable institution.
4. It gets busy with visible activity.
5. It sells the public on what the leadership has decided is best.

This formula is easy to follow, and Mathews considers this to be appropriate for most problems that a community faces except for one particular problem that Selma has been known to face: poverty.

Mathews writes that poverty includes a cluster of “interrelated problems.”

“In the case of poverty, they include demands that today’s industries make on workers, inadequate education, absence of good work habits, weakened family structure and (some would say) lack of compassion for the less fortunate.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all of these factors are why Selma is facing this problem.

The compassion for the less fortunate in particular is something that this city is not lacking in thanks to organizations such as the Edmundite Missions.

There are people and groups in place that are working on many of these issues in our city, but Mathews also talks about concentrating on just one of the interconnected problems to make the overall issue more manageable.

Finding ways to fix one of the interconnected problems can have a lot of different solutions, however breaking a complex set of problems apart can also lead us to overlook vital interconnections.

“Consider what often happens when we try to help young people who wind up on the margins of society,” Mathews writes. “There are as many agencies providing services for youth at risk as there are labels for what afflicts them. Yet despite the growing seriousness of the problems, few cities or states have a policy that coordinates all the relevant governmental and nongovernmental services.”

Mathews gives an example of problems that the youth in a community can face such as pregnant teens, drug abusers and high school dropouts, that are placed in groups that correspond to the missions of the agencies designated to serve them.

“While each of these agencies may be helpful, the left hand often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” Mathews writes. “Though the subdivisions are logical, they ignore an important reality: individuals are whole people, whose maladies are interrelated.”

There is a need for cooperation within the groups that are working solo most times to make the community great.

This brings us to the topic of solution wars.

“Some efforts to make needed changes don’t even get as far as fragmented initiatives,” Mathews writes. “Pressure to find the ‘right solution’ can lock a community into a never-ending battle between proponents of different plans. Those who rush to solutions often say that everybody knows what the problem is.”

Quite simply “communities have been known to spend their energy debating which of a number of pre-determined solutions is best, little aware that there is no agreement on the nature of the problem.”

We all know that there are problems in Selma.

How the problem is understood varies with different people, and Mathews writes that this varies on people’s circumstances and interest, and unless there is mutual understanding of different perspectives, people are not likely to work together as a community, Mathews says.

Yes, there are people in place to address problems here in the community, but it all means nothing unless there is a mutual understanding of different leaders’ perspectives.

Mathews’ work with his organization, Kettering, suggests that “civic organizations can end or prevent solution wars and encourage a fresh start by raising questions that prompt people to step back and identify what it is they really want for their communities before talking about specific solutions. These questions must probe beneath current debates in order to find out what citizens care most about.”

So, therein is the question: What do you want for your community?