For Recovery, Empower the People : Rebuilding: Let residents guide the way, through responsible and ethical use of power for the common good.

There are seeds of hope in the riot corridors of South Los Angeles.

The Challenger Boys and Girls Club stands unscorched on a block blackened by fire--a testimony to residents’ determination to preserve the social-service center begun in the wake of the Watts riots.

Ground is broken on schedule for a new Catholic high school on Pico Boulevard, a statement of the Los Angeles Archdiocese’s commitment to quality education for inner-city, minority youth.

A supermarket chain sends an 18-wheeler loaded with 1,400 cases of food and household items to a South-Central food pantry. Donations for the people made poorer by the riots pour in from the more affluent parts of the city.

What is missing, however, is the sure statement that government, corporations and community organizations can work together to build a community that works. One solution given short shrift in the discussion of how to rebuild the city is to empower occupants to guide it themselves.

Empowerment is not a liberal notion of spending vast sums of money to entrench a welfare system. It’s not about more taxes, public assistance or creeping socialism. Neither is empowerment a policy of giving tax breaks and other incentives to people outside a community in hopes that jobs will trickle down to local homeboys.

True empowerment of people happens when the residents of a community have the opportunity to define their problems for themselves, and the means to seek solutions to the underlying issues. If the problem is jobs, there must be access to the venture capital that will launch new businesses. If the problem is housing, cooperatives, tenants associations, homestead provisions and available mortgage money can engender resident owners and managers. If the problem is public safety, sufficient neighborhood political clout will ensure fair police protection. Empowerment offers the challenge of a responsible and ethical use of power for the common good, rather than its abuse or non-use.

Though the concept has come into vogue in the past few weeks, empowerment of the poor is not new. The Catholic Church in the United States embraced a strategy for easing the causes of poverty in 1970 when it began the Campaign for Human Development. For more than 20 years, this campaign has funded self-help organizations to change the basic systems and policies that keep their communities impoverished. It works.

In the Los Angeles area, campaign-funded groups such as the United Neighborhoods Organization, the Southern California Organizing Committee, Valley Organized in Community Efforts and the East Valleys Organization have been instrumental in raising the minimum wage and banning assault weapons in California. Two other groups, Proyecto Pastoral and the Central American Refugee Center, are working on developing economic strength through minority-owned small businesses.

These programs work not only because they bring justice to poor people, but also because the whole community benefits. Empowering one neighborhood doesn’t disenfranchise another. It’s not win-lose, but rather win-win. The city gains a stable, strong, safe neighborhood when people accept the responsibility of maintaining homes and businesses and nurturing families. The city’s tax base grows when small businesses, the biggest source of new jobs, flourish. And companies begun and staffed by community residents are more likely to stay local than the branch offices or subsidiaries of an “outside” corporation.

Local residents trained in the leadership of community organizations can act as a buffer in time of crisis and motivate positive action between storms. Local leaders are the best role models for youth, a daily reminder of what is possible and evidence that drug dealers don’t have all the power, money and status.

More than 20 years ago, the Catholic bishops who created the Campaign for Human Development offered a national, ecumenical model for overcoming poverty. It included a preferential option toward those who are least well-off, a policy for empowering the poor, a strategy to activate change from the bottom up rather than the top down and an approach calling for full participation of the poor in the management of their communities.

The campaign’s successful program of empowerment is a policy that will work in the rebuilding of Los Angeles. The Campaign for Human Development is supporting this belief with more than $500,000 to back an economic development project for the redevelopment of the city--and time, manpower and technical assistance worth immeasurably more. Equally important, empowerment is a methodology to recommit new life to all our urban communities.