Core Identity

Our Vision

Strong, thriving, resilient, constituent-led communities in the Coastal Bend of South Texas.

A community-strengthening movement that expands the paradigm of helping from need based charity to capacity-based, grassroots empowerment

A regional multiagency collaborative model of empowering communities.

Our Purpose

Our Purpose is to strengthen vulnerable communities by:

• Shifting from the traditional charity/relief approach that fosters dependency, to community development approach that builds capacity.
• Shifting from traditional top-down service, to supporting self-led grassroots initiatives.            

Our Mission 

We are on a mission to:

• Strengthen communities to achieve self-determined goals through resident-led development. 
• Coach and train local organizations to facilitate the self-development of communities they serve. 

Our Values

• Neighborhoods and community groups are the basic unit of social change.
• All communities have hopes, dreams and concerns they care about, which may be very different from the agenda of an outside agency or organization who wants to engage them.
• All communities have abundant assets (relationships, gifts, skills, talents, culture, methods of exchange, story, associations) and the capacity to thrive by mobilizing their assets to do what matters to them and their wellbeing.

What We Believe

We believe that:

• Complex, systemic problems like poverty and its related issues require a change of underlying root causes at the community level.
• Neighborhoods and community groups are the basic unit of social change.
• All communities have hopes, dreams and concerns they care about, which may be very different from the agenda of an outside agency or organization who wants to engage them.
• All communities have abundant assets (relationships, gifts, skills, talents, culture, methods of exchange, story, associations) and the capacity to thrive by mobilizing their assets to do what matters to them and their wellbeing.
• When one-way, top-down, charitable assistance does not transition in a timely way to the development of communities to thrive, it disempowers the people most impacted, diminishing their capacity to mobilize their assets to do what matters to them and their wellbeing.

What Makes Us Different

Coastal Bend Community Empowerment uses a community development model rather than a social services model. We help citizens reclaim their communities. We shift the power for neighborhood wellbeing back to the people who live there by coaching communities to identify what they care about, mobilize their strengths, and take collective action on shared goals.