Citizen participation in the decision-making activities of formal social service agencies: an unreasonable goal?

In the past, attempts by social service agencies to include nonprofessional area residents in program planning and policy-making activities have met with little success. Such failures may be due in part to mistrust and a feeling that the agencies and their programs have little relevance to the problems faced by most people. Perhaps an alternative way of developing resident participation in community action programs would be to move the planning and decision-making process away from the trained experts associated with formal institutions to the residents within the neighborhoods themselves. The people living within a defined community would decide which problems they wish to address, and then use resources available within the community to solve them.