The Greatest Distance . . . : . . . is often the one between neighboring communities. Despite setbacks, organizers keep looking for ways to strengthen bonds.

Last June, a day of dialogue on community building was supposed to have been held in Los Angeles. It was intended, as was a previous dialogue on race relations, to get ordinary people to cross freeways they don’t usually cross to talk to one another in salon settings--in this case about new ways to reconnect with each other in a sprawling and fragmented metropolis. The idea was to counter the common complaint that nothing works.

The plan fell apart, some would-be participants say, because the leaders in various organizations--all with words like “community” and “partners” in their titles--were too busy attending to national and international community-building efforts. Some government and private sources who asked not to be identified say it was a “turf thing” in a city known as a bastion of traditional power arrangements. Others sigh that it was just L.A. being its overwhelming and disconnected self.

“Who was going to take ownership of it became somewhat of an issue,” said one prominent community leader. What’s more, in the nonprofit world, as everywhere else, “Everything is outcome driven,” the leader said. “What’s the outcome of a dialogue?”

The nonevent shows some of what community builders face as they endeavor to engage people in group or civic projects: skepticism, lack of time, mutual distrust, philosophical disputes, burnout, distance or obstacles from government bureaucracies.

“The irony is, the communities that need [community building] the most are the most difficult places to do it,” says Tom Sander, executive director of a civic engagement seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “There are real challenges. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

Advocates like Sander believe civic action must take place--in new and creative ways--to reverse a slide of civic disengagement that they say is connected to poor schools, unsafe neighborhoods and even serious health problems.

Partly in response to the work of Sander’s colleague Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) and other theorists, who are concerned about the distinct lack of civic engagement over the past 30 years, and partly in response to the devolution of power and control from the federal government to localities, a huge wave of individuals and organizations is sweeping the country urging others to volunteer, collaborate, decentralize or join up in some kind of community effort. The word “community” now elicits more than 8 million hits on an Internet search, including community gardens, community surfing, community psychology, African American and Chinese American communities, and of course, community networking on the Internet.

It’s becoming fashionable to mentor young people, require them to perform community service and wear uniforms in school, design parks so people will meet face to face, volunteer to help police, organize therapy in groups, produce positive news stories, and more. Low-income communities are starting “time dollar” barter systems, trading services on an hourly basis. Husbands, wanting to be better family men, are filling stadiums, pledging to be Promise Keepers.

But amid the enthusiasm, there are skeptical voices from the mainstream cautioning that the problems are too big for citizens to solve alone with a Neighborhood Watch or school uniforms. For instance, the Rev. Albert Pennybacker, director of the Washington, D.C., office of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, objected to President Clinton’s proposal--after last year’s withdrawal of federal aid for some poor children--that every church provide a job for one welfare recipient.

“Our job is not to compensate for the failure of government to do its job,” he said. As a pastor, Pennybacker recalled encouraging congregation members to volunteer in the community. “Not long after they were working in the soup kitchen or the food bank or sewing clothing, they started to ask why these people had no health care, or why there were hungry people or why the people were unemployed when there ought to be some way to share the resources.

“Churches and other nonprofit entities can be legitimate partners with the government,” he said. “But there’s no way for voluntary contributions or church budgets to underwrite the poor, abused and marginalized in society. No way in the world. To advocate that is to increase a cynical avoidance of the legitimate social contract.”

Opposition from the fringe is more absolute. “I am not my brother’s keeper,” says Scott McConnell, communications director for the Marina del Rey-based Ayn Rand Institute, which opposes community service requirements in public schools. “The American ideal is that the individual should be free to pursue his own happiness. . . . We’re being chained together to serve others, mostly motivated by guilt.”

*

Even those willing and eager to help others have run into barriers of turf and trust when they begin knocking on the doors of professionals and bureaucrats. After Clinton promoted his America Reads Challenge to mobilize 1 million volunteers to bring students’ reading skills up to par, several teachers told Education Week that teaching reading is too sophisticated to leave to nonprofessionals. “If these children are not learning to read, I don’t see how untrained people can be expected to do it better,” bristled Judith R. Birsh, a master teacher trainer at Columbia University.

Some outsiders spark resentment when they come to improve things--as Colin Powell did during April’s presidential summit on service, when he led volunteers into a Philadelphia neighborhood to paint out graffiti.

Neighborhood sensitivities are also exposed when big government agencies try to share responsibility with them. Auditors want local organizations to be accountable. Local organizations don’t like being told what to do.

“The problem is, they just don’t get collaboration,” says Karen Williams, an official of the Watts-based Drew Child Development Corp., one of 28 private agencies that contracted with Los Angeles County to help families faced with losing their children to foster care. “People are telling you the way things are done and how you do it.”

In a similar brush with bureaucrats, Molly Cooley, a Portland, Ore., activist who is using an “asset building” approach to help poor and isolated women learn computer skills and then teach others, shed tears when government auditors required her to label her beloved students “work force units.”

Not all villages can agree about how to raise a child even when they try. One pastor in a small Midwestern town gave up promoting an effort to build “assets” in young people because of resistance from three different factions: those who favored teen drinking as an alternative to drugs, those who supported tougher law enforcement and those who feared public exposure of private family problems.

*

On a personal level, the quest for community can also bog down in niche confusion. People wonder whether they can find community far from their childhood homes, or if it must be rooted in an actual place. Is their community a community of people like them, or unlike them?

What if their communities conflict?

What if one village wants to protect itself from people in the next village? Or get rid of undesirables? Where will they go? How large shall we draw the circle of community? The nation? The world?

Ideally, says Harvard’s Sander, the types of community that make democracies strongest are those in which people find ways to get together with people least like themselves. If people form communities with people who are like them in every regard--whether it’s religion or socioeconomic class, ethnicity or geographic neighborhood--it “tends to lead to more entrenched pockets of us versus them.”

On the other hand, he says it’s better to join one community than none at all--even if it’s a support group for your own benefit, or just for the knowledge that someone will notice if you don’t show up for a meeting. “Without increased activism to get more involved or be more connected, we tend to get ever more disengaged,” he says.

Historians observe that ours is not the first period in history to try to build community as a solution to social problems. A century ago, after decades of rapid technological and social change, people created unions, fraternal organizations, social clubs and youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Sander says. The key to their success in engaging people was that they did not try to return to the past, but rather created new forms of communities, he said. Soccer leagues, community service and the Promise Keepers may hold the same potential today, even if the idea seems outlandish to some.

“If you thought in 1897 that part of the answer was having kids wear shorts and beanies to give them a sense of identity to something larger, it would have seemed ridiculous. But they have endured and have had a huge impact in connecting young people to community,” he says.

*

Others believe cycles of history indicate that obstacles to community will naturally fade over time, and teamwork, collaboration and common purpose will inevitably triumph. Basing his predictions on historical patterns that repeat over generations, Neil Howe, co-author of “The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous With Destiny” (Broadway Books, 1997), envisions that a period of social stability and public trust will arrive by 2015.

Already, rates of teen pregnancy, juvenile crime, divorce and drug use are leveling off. Today’s children, schooled in civic activity and teamwork, he believes, will become even more sociable and group-oriented. At that point, he says, “We will have strong public institutions to match the growing communitarian mood, which people will recall started in the late 1980s.

“At the same time, there will be the first stirrings of complaints. Some people will say, ‘Gee, no one speaks for himself anymore. Whatever happened to the individual?’ ”