Purpose

Purpose. The Community Self-Help program is an effort to help communities address needs such as water, wastewater, downtown improvements, recreation (swimming pools and general maintenance are not eligible) and other CDBG eligible activities. The Community Self- Help program is a resource for small communities to meet local needs with less money. Self- Help is the development and use of a community's own resources (human, material and financial) to solve problems for less cost. This approach begins with the answer to a key question, "What can we afford?" and then initiates a local focus of control based on the applicant's design and plans for solving the problem. Self-Help refers to the collective effort of people working together to create or improve a service or facility (for example, a water system) that they will use in common, and which is not exclusively owned by any one person or household. Self-Help and volunteerism are not synonymous. Self-Help includes the use of volunteers as one technique among many that can reduce the cost of a needed community improvement. Self-Help is an exercise in communities developing and building their own capacity to come together to solve problems in a collective way.