ABSTRACT
We have tried to show how a growing concern with the decay of city life led the Ford Foundation and the President's Committee to conceive a new approach to community change; and how, convinced that slums, unemployment and juvenile crime could only be understood as the outcome of many interrelated social factors, they concluded that any remedies must depend on correspondingly many-sided action. The terms in which they understood the problem—the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, and the failure of social services to intervene imaginatively or coherently to break it—emphasized those obstacles to change which a community itself could tackle, without greatly increased resources.
