Theorists have further developed the concept of community capacity based on the concept of community capacity.
Glickman and Servon (1998), who were earlier concerned with community capacity, proposed that community capacity refers to five types of capabilities:
(1) Resource capacity: including obtaining resources through grants, contracts, loans and other institutions, and properly managing and maintaining funds to achieve community goals.
(2) Organizational capacity: including management methods, skills, scale and the role played by the organization and financial capacity.
(3) Program capacity: the ability to construct and manage programs. Providing services to the public through programs can provide technical assistance for economic development and can also be committed to developing cultural and educational activities.
(4) Network capacity: by collaborating with other community-based organizations, private companies, charities, education and politics, fundraising for programs or projects to access non-financial resources and increase political influence.
(5) Political capacity: refers to the ability to mobilize people in the neighborhood to support issues of concern to the community.
Fredericksen and London (2000) focused on community organizational capacity and summarized four dimensions of capacity:
Each dimension further includes several sub-items.
Following their collaboration with Laverack, Gibbon incorporated the following dimensions of community capacity: participation, leadership, organizational structure, problem assessment, resource mobilization, reasoning (reflection), connections, the role of external organizations, and program management and implementation (Gibbon et al., 2002). Clearly, for Gibbon and Laverack, the concept of community capacity places greater emphasis on organizational capabilities.
Lee (2021) developed a set of community capacity indicators based on literature examining community capacity dimensions, encompassing six dimensions: organization and leadership, administration (internal administration and financial management), resource linkage and mobilization, community participation, networking and collaboration, and political advocacy and public relations. Each dimension includes five sub-items. This total of 30 items constitutes a community capacity measure. Importantly, each item describes four different levels of competence, allowing professionals involved in community empowerment to use it as a capacity assessment.
The indicators developed by Lee (2021) are based on actual community organizations, and the resulting scores are validated against government evaluations, demonstrating criterion validity.
While professional community capacity measures have a scientific basis, they are not readily applicable in practice. For community officials and leaders, assessing community capacity can facilitate strategic analysis. Furthermore, simplified community capacity assessment tools have become popular among practitioners. Although simplified assessment tools are also based on theory, their connection to theory is often rather sketchy. Furthermore, simplified assessment tools are often relatively crude, but their greatest strengths are convenience and ease of use.
Practitioners (Lee, 2014) have gradually adopted some simple tools to understand communities. For example, assessments are conducted based on factors such as space, clerical and administrative capacity of community organizations, general affairs capacity, financial capacity, volunteer size, team support, and community atmosphere (level of trust and harmony). Each factor is further categorized as high (excellent, large, good), medium, and low (slight, small, poor), providing a general assessment of community organizations and their environment. While these assessments are inherently subjective, the combined perspectives of community cadres (or supervisors) can be used to represent their general impressions of the community (and community organizations), providing useful information for practical work.