There is no reason--save fear of the unconventional--that the businesses could not be owned by the community--through its Neighborhood Corporation--partly as cooperatives, partly as corporations. The profits could then be plowed back into such community srevices as day-care centers, teenage centers, training programs, etc.

The community itself, in short, could provide its own anti-poverty or development fund--if the community as a whole owned its own businesses, or at least some of them.

Thus the Neighborhood Service Corporation, on the model of Columbus, would also own neighborhood businesses. Again, one man, one vote.

Examples of experiments which move in this direction also exist in New York, in Georgia, in California, and elsewhere. None is fully developed as yet; but all move towards using business self-help skills to provide an expanding source of funds--from profits--to develop the other aspects of the community's social service program.

(There are also some very interesting tax angles which are available to help facilitate the transfer of ownership of old or new businesses for such special community purposes.)

AGAIN, THE conventional mind can find a thousand reasons why such an approach will not work. But those with imagination can see that the community corporation idea--linked to an independent source of funds which can supplement and perhaps eventually take the place of anti-poverty funds--is a creative response to our present difficulties.

Morcover, loans to community-owned businesses are not hand outs. They are paid back. The result is a healthier relationship between the one who is helped and the one who does the helping.

And, above all, from the community point of view, a continued independent 0source of funds can transform the neighborhood corporation from a limited administrative form into a true arena for community action. Indeed, if we are serious about attempting to recreate democratic participation in America, community decisions are simply going to have to involve the attraction of real resources.

Once again, the Marshall Plan comes to mind. What we are talking about is helping communities get on their own feet--through the development of industry--and through an institution which can use community profits directly for community services.

In the Marshall Plan the political institution of the nation state--through its power to tax--helped to translate profits from industry into needed social services. In the American city the tax power is severely limited. A new democratically controlled institution, the Community Corporation -- which administers neighborhood services and owns some neighborhood industry--is needed to fulfill the same function and to respond to the local community as no centralized nation state can.

Such unconventional ideas, of course, sound very much like the rhetoric of the black miiltant who speaks vaguely of community control. The ideas are very much in accord with such thinking, though the black militant has rarely made the explicit link between community services and community industry. They are also the logical extension of the concept of decentralization. But the ideas need not be restricted to the black community.

If the Mayor were really prepared to innovate and invent, he would at once see that the poor white communities of Boston have many of the same difficulties as the black communities. There is no reason he could not help a solid but poor Irish neighborhood develop its own community controlled services and enterprises at the same time a black neighborhood is doing so.

Were he to apply the same program across the color line, of course, he might see that race conflicts which continually erupt into politics could be short-circuited--in part at least. For a program which met the needs of both the black and white communities, and involved loans, self-help, and very few hand-outs, could be the basis of a new politics--a politics which did not have to tax one group to give hand-outs to another--and a politics which could take a long step towards the political reconstruction of the ideal of community and cooperation.

Such an approach might even help American cities get beyond the crisis which threatens to pull conventional-minded leadership into the hands of violence, counter-violence--and the now all too conventional cycle of rebellion, terror and repression