Community Building

ISC's work is based on the idea that ordinary people have the ability to transform their communities—and that each community has within it the power to solve seemingly intractable problems. Our community-based projects simply help people gain the skills and resources they need to find these solutions.

We focus on helping communities solve problems because we find that a project supported by the community has the most dramatic and longest lasting results. The spirit of the community overcomes deeply entrenched divisions and inspires citizens to pool resources to make their vision happen—and in the process, each person discovers that they have the power to make their world a better place to live. We help communities by bringing together many different groups of residents—ordinary citizens, nonprofit leaders, elected officials, business owners, educators—to identify community issues, prioritize them, and take action to resolve them.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties, it left behind a legacy of economic development at the expense of the environment. Substantial air and water pollution dogged Central and Eastern Europe, and vast numbers of towns were without sewage treatment systems or waste collection. Yet because these issues dramatically affected people's health—especially children—we found that despite many years of a central government handling such issues, people were eager to get involved in bringing clean air, water, and land to their communities.

Tangible Results

• Troyan, Bulgaria, sits on the edge of a natural reserve and national park that had become a popular recreation area when ISC first arrived in 1992. But untreated wastewater, agricultural runoff, and an uncovered landfill polluted the Beli Osam River. When the Minister of Environment saw the city's solid waste plan created with citizen input, he invited ISC and Troyan leaders to help develop national legislation that required a similar process in each municipality.
• A lake near Elk, Poland, was biologically dead—it had become so overloaded with nutrients from nearby farms and untreated wastewater that algae blooms had taken over, suffocating plant and animal life in the water. A rotten egg smell pervaded the air. Because we brought people together to help solve the problem, residents quickly stopped pumping waste into the lake and created a comprehensive plan for wastewater treatment. A bright yellow float now aerates the water to bring oxygen—and life—back to the lake.
• In Labunista, Macedonia, an outbreak of hepatitis struck 95 percent of the village's children. A local doctor, Aladin Demisovski, traced its source to the open sewage that seeped along streets after rains. We helped him bring the community together to address the problem and build support for a new sewage treatment plant in a nearby town. Citizens voted overwhelmingly to assess a 5 dollar tax each month to pay for new pipes—and then picked up their shovels to dig the trenches.