The study chronicles the support for and conflicts engendered by what initially appeared to be a community-run halfway house and its ultimate transformation into more of a community-based program in which policy and resources were both locally and non-locally determined. This transformation is shown to be the result of the new organization's struggle for survival and its dependence on other organizations located on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Some lessons from this case study are the importance of key individual actors in both the successes and failures of the halfway house, the shifting influence of various organizations over time, and the necessity of finding the right mix of local and non-local forces to create a viable organizational force field. Another lesson is that the image and form of organizing is just as crucial as the substance of operations if an organization is to survive. Other lessons pertain to limited community resources, formalization as a crisis, the disadvantages of the private sector, non-local dimensions of community, and advantages of multiple functional ties. Discussion questions.