In Seattle, a nonprofit community-based organization (CBO) employs some of the city's poorest and least-skilled people to manufacture critical components for Boeing using state-of-the-art technology. The country's largest predominantly African-American CBO, based in the heart of Newark, N.J., trains health professionals for world-class companies such as pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. In Silicon Valley, a community job-training operation has won consecutive subcontracts with such electronics giants as Motorola and Hewlett-Packard.

These examples illustrate a promising trend in urban development. Community-based organizations provide the economic and political voice that low-income communities of color lack. They shore up, or substitute for, the family connections and influence with business and political actors that poverty and discrimination have so deeply eroded. In the absence of strong CBOs, the economic revitalization of inner cities that would benefit society as a whole is inconceivable.

Nonprofit training-program operators, small-business owners, and housing developers located in low-income areas have long confronted the day-to-day travails of doing business in neighborhoods that have suffered from years of physical, social, and political neglect. Now new forces are adding to the pressure even as they open up new opportunities. Especially challenging are the devolution of federal money and power to the states and the continuing trend toward privatization of hitherto publicly provided services.

One response lies in forging or joining formal business networks with local technology companies. Subcontracts to supply parts or services to mainstream corporations bring immediate jobs and revenues into inner cities. Over the longer term, participation within the manufacturing "supplier chains" facilitates the technological learning that will help communities compete. And regular interaction with established firms can help give urban developers new private-sector allies-linkages that can pay off not only in job placements for the CBOs' inner-city constituents but also in future political support and financing.