Contents of Winter 2005 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:
In this issue:
Collaborative Solutions - Engaging the
Community
1. Agency-Based and Community-Based Approaches.
2. Four approaches that work:
Mini-grants
Leadership
development
Community
outreach workers
Community
organizers
Resources:
COMM-ORG
Right Question
Project
In our last newsletter, we
talked about the six key components of collaborative solutions. In this
newsletter, we would like to focus on the first component in more detail:
Engaging a broad spectrum of the community, especially those most directly
affected by the issues.
The Community as an Empowered Partner – a Tale
Len Syme, a respected professor
emeritus of public health, recently reviewed his career’s work
in light of the concept of the engaged community. His personal, frank,
and self-critical analysis offers a good place for us to begin our discussion
of the importance of engaging the community in our work.
"While we in public health know
the importance of involving community partners in our programs, we also
know how difficult it is to do. The challenge of involving the community
is especially difficult if one has been trained, as I have been trained,
to be an arrogant, elitist prima donna. I am the "expert,"
after all, and I help people by sharing my expertise.
"Let me begin by describing
my own humbling attempts at community involvement through a smoking-cessation
project I directed several years ago in Richmond, California. I came
to the project with a dismal record in assisting people individually
to quit smoking, so in the Richmond project I resolved to take a different
tack; I designed the Richmond project as a community project. By having
a block captain in every neighborhood in Richmond, I planned to involve
the business community, the schools, and community groups. My idea was
to change the climate in Richmond with regard to smoking by challenging
its acceptance, its values, and its attractiveness.
"Toward that end, I wrote
a brilliant 5-year research grant and sent it to the National Cancer
Institute (NCI). It was a bold, expensive project at $2 million, and
for that reason NCI sent a large site-visit team to discuss it. By the
end of the visit, NCI agreed that my project was brilliant, and in fact
later used the design as the basis for the nationwide COMMIT study conducted
in more than 20 communities around the nation.
"With NCI's enthusiastic
support, we proceeded to implement the project for 5 years. Our team
worked hard, followed the design carefully, and at the end of 5 years
we compared the results we achieved in smoking cessation with our 2
comparison communities, Oakland and San Francisco. We found no difference
in smoking quit rates. It was only later, after I finished brooding,
that I understood the challenges of that community-partnership model.
Richmond is a very poor city. It has many unemployed people, high crime
and drug use, very few health services, and air pollution from nearby
oil refineries. Of all the problems faced by people in that community,
I doubt that smoking was very high on their priority list. But of course
I had never asked them about their priorities, and even if I had, I
probably would have persisted with my plan anyway; I was, after all,
the expert.
"I learned another painful
lesson from that experience. Early in the Richmond project, a group
of teenagers came to us and said they would like to make a rock video
about smoking. They offered to write the music and the words, but wanted
our help to invite a famous rock star — I can't remember her name
now — to spend one day on the project, and they wanted a music-video
director from Hollywood to come, too. We hadn't budgeted for such expenses,
but we did it anyway. The rock star came in her limousine and the Hollywood
director showed them how to set up the scenes for filming. Afterward,
the students showed the video they produced at a large movie theater
in the community. They printed the tickets for this show, made the advertisements,
and served as ushers, and the sold-out show received a long standing
ovation from the audience. The video was subsequently shown in many
places around the world, and the community received royalty money for
it.
"Unfortunately, the video
was not part of my brilliant research plan, and we had no money to evaluate
its benefits. So the one thing in the project that came from the community
— and incidentally the one thing that probably made the biggest
impact — was not conceived, implemented, or evaluated by our research
team. So much for my brilliance.
"To add to my embarrassment,
the nationwide COMMIT study, based on my Richmond design, reported its
results: the study failed to show a difference in smoking cessation
rates between the study and comparison communities.
"Why was it so hard for
us — for me — to see the importance of embracing the community
as an empowered partner?"
(Syme, S. L. Social determinants of health: the community as an empowered
partner. Prev. Chronic Dis. [serial online] 2004 Jan [date cited].
Available from: URL: http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2004/jan/03_0001.htm)
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Engaging the Community
Syme’s
stories, comments, and questions are provocative.
In our experience, those who
approach community work from a framework of community development or
organization understand from the outset how critically important it
is to conceive of the community as an empowered partner. However, in
many situations, the resources for working in community are held by
the health and human services system, not by groups focused on community
development. As a helping system, health and human services are deeply
flawed when it comes to working with communities. John McKnight has
pointed out that health and human services institutions see the community
in terms of its deficits, and they find meaning in their capacity to
fix those deficits.
McKnight strongly suggests
an alternative approach based on a community’s strengths and assets.
This approach includes three simple steps (1) identify the community's
assets, (2) connect these assets, and (3) harness the assets to a community
vision. While these steps are simple, they require people who know the
community well enough to identify its strengths and to have access to
its key members.
Successful engagement of
a broad spectrum of the community also requires that solutions to an
issue be developed by those who are most directly affected by it. As
long as we continue to "do for" rather than "do with,"
we will continue to experience the kinds of failures and frustrations
that Syme describes so well.
Why involve the community?
What are the benefits of involving grassroots organizations and leaders?
What essential and missing offerings do they bring to the table?
• Local community
groups can communicate with people that outsiders
can’t
reach.
• Community members
know about, and can connect with, both formal
and informal
leaders.
• The often-overlooked
informal leaders have constituencies,
knowledge,
and clout.
• Community members
know what has and hasn’t worked in the past.
They are
the community historians.
• Community members
can promote ownership of and participation in
the project.
• Because of their breadth
and depth of local knowledge, community
members
are the best architects of the solutions.
• Community members
can help create positive social norms.
• Local community organizations
build local leadership
Agency Based and Community Based
Approaches
In our work,
we have found it constructive to help programs clarify the assumptions
behind their approach to the community. It’s most important to
be able to distinguish between agency-based and community-based initiatives.
Too often, we talk about developing a program in which the community
will be an empowered partner, but the strategies we use are agency-based
rather than community-based. Community empowerment can only be achieved
through the community-based approach. The chart below allows us to look
at the difference between agency-based and community-based approaches.
(The chart comes in part from the work of David Chavis and Paul Florin,
with adaptations by Tom Wolff and Gillian Kaye.)
| Issues |
Agency-Based |
Community-Based |
| Approach |
Weakness/deficit |
Strength/asset |
Definition of
the problem
|
By agencies and/or
government
|
By local community
Members |
| Role of professional(s) |
Central to decision-making
|
Resource for
community
problem-solving |
Primary decision-
makers |
Agencies and/or
government |
Community members |
| Potential for community ownership |
Low |
High |
Community’s
control of resources |
Low |
High |
If you determine that your
programming and work sit in the “agency-based” column, yet,
like Syme, you would like to have the community as an empowered partner,
a big question arises: How do you move your work to the "community-based"
column?
We’ve seen programs
that tear their hair out around this question, yet often the answer
can be quite simple—if you are willing to commit resources to
your vision. Good results can be obtained with small or large amounts
of resources. So instead of complaining about the lack of community
response, we can do something about it. All we need to do is make a
commitment and use our resources wisely.
Four Approaches That Work
There are four ways in
which we have seen communities use small or large amounts of resources
to increase community members’ engagement. Each has a high percentage
of success. They involve the use of:
1. mini-grants,
2. leadership development,
3. community outreach workers, and
4. community organizers.
Let’s look at these
approaches one at a time.
# 1 Mini-grants
Mini-grants are small grants
aimed specifically at engaging the community. We’ve seen mini-grants
as small as $100, and as large as $5,000. In general, the grant is
small enough not to interest large institutions, but large enough
to be attractive to community associations and grassroots organizations
that are interested in the issue at hand.
In one community, we were
working on the issue of traffic safety. Other than the police department,
it was hard to identify members of the community who were interested
in traffic safety. By offering mini-grants of between $200 and $500
on issues related to traffic safety, we were able to bring many groups
out of the woodwork. These included the volunteers on the town’s
ambulance, who saw the effects of people not using car safety belts;
a Girl Scout troop; a health educator in the high school; and a church
group. Small amounts of money given to these groups led to interesting
and innovative approaches to traffic safety. More importantly, they
made connections within the community and set up new partnerships
for the traffic safety program.
Here’s another example.
In Rockford, Illinois, a violence-prevention program was trying to
build a partnership with the Black community without much luck. The
program offered $5000 in mini-grants to Black churches that wanted
to become involved in summer programming for youth that would focus
on violence prevention. A number of churches applied and were awarded
grants. Over the summer, as the churches began to offer their programs,
the violence-prevention program trained church groups in critical
violence-prevention issues and built meaningful partnerships with
them. By the end of the summer, a number of ministers had joined the
board of the violence-prevention initiative and an ongoing partnership
was formed to address community issues of violence prevention. (See
www.peacebeyondviolence.org,
The Institute for Community Peace)
Before you offer mini-grants,
you will need to find answers to a handful of critical questions:
• how you will get the word
out to groups to apply,
• how you will help informal
community associations fill out a formal application,
• how you will keep the
application simple,
• how you will support the
groups in completing their tasks, and
• how you will maximize
the potential for building a partnership with these
community groups during the mini-grant period.
(For more information see
Tip Sheet on Mini Grants in Tools and Resources www.tomwolff.com)
(mini- grant tip sheet)
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# 2 Leadership Development
When we develop projects
for people in what we have identified as “target communities”
and ”target populations,” we often bemoan our inability
to find members of those communities who can come forward and take
leadership positions. It’s enormously helpful to change our
thinking so that we assume that community leaders already exist and
it's our task to locate them. While we’re making assumptions,
we can also assume that members of most disenfranchised populations
have not had the opportunity to learn leadership skills. Therefore,
in addition to finding the existing leaders we need to create opportunities
for other people to develop leadership skills.
Our experience leads us
to believe that in any community there are large numbers of people
who would like to become leaders and are willing to work to gain the
skills of leadership. However, in disenfranchised communities many
(if not most) of these people won’t believe that they have what
it takes to be a leader. They have absorbed negative social messages
and have backed away from leadership roles. Leadership development
and training give these individuals the skills and the self-confidence
to become both effective and empowered.
In Athol, Massachusetts,
when we began a grassroots child-abuse prevention program, we knew
that we would need to provide leadership opportunities for “at
risk” parents and other interested people. We found a leadership-development
program that worked. Called Master Teacher, it was also simple to
implement. The Athol community’s Valuing Our Children child-abuse
prevention program has been using it for more than a decade to train
parents as community leaders. (The program was developed by Marge
Slinski; http://crs.uvm.edu/nnco/communsupp/.
They created a variation of Master Teacher that they called ACE (Active
Community Education).
One community leader, Maggie
Britt, described her experience this way: “I took the Master
Teacher program and learned leadership skills for community volunteering.
I learned for the first time that I could participate in my child's
education. I started volunteering at his school, and then got a job
as Assistant School-linked Coordinator, to run after school activity
programs. The Master Teacher program helped me understand the value
of volunteering in my community. The program also offers ongoing training,
to help me to continue to grow as a leader in my community."
(Community Catalyst Newsletter, Community Partners, March 1998 Vol.7,
No.1)
There are numerous other
leadership-development curricula that are of great value. Another
one that we've employed is the Right Question Project. We originally
worked with RQP to help train low-income parents to become advocates
for their children's education. Since that time, RQP has broadly expanded
its vision and developed many resources that can be checked out at
their web site (www.rightquestion.org;
for more information- see Resources in this
Newsletter).
An investment in leadership
development pays off throughout the community and for many years.
Most importantly, the community will gain valuable new leaders drawn
from disenfranchised populations. For your specific program, these
newly trained leaders can become the most crucial link between you
and the community.
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# 3 Community Outreach Workers
Community outreach workers are
a growing group of key personnel in health, human services and community
development. Community outreach workers act as connectors between
residents (consumers) and the local system of services and programs.
They are especially being used in health and public-health programs
to provide information and care to critical populations that have
traditionally lacked access to services. These workers can do a wide
array of jobs in the community. They can provide health promotion,
social support, advocacy, community organization, and case-finding
services, and they can act as change-agents within the community.
What makes community outreach
workers unique is that they come from the community that they work
in and they are familiar with its characteristics. This familiarity
gives them the ability to efficiently develop and implement strategies
designed to address local, specific needs. They comprehend the myriad
situations of individuals and families in their communities. They
understand the local culture. They become the link between formal
helping programs and the community.
In Massachusetts, the state passed
legislation that essentially provided universal health-care coverage
for all children. We were faced with the challenge of enrolling all
uninsured children in available programs, but how? We turned to a
model based on the local power of community outreach workers. First
the state had to be convinced that the outreach workers could solve
their problem. Then we lobbied for $1 million in local grants. Using
these resources, an army of outreach workers was built to engage every
community and sub-community across the state and inform eligible parents
that their children could have universal health-care coverage. Because
of the local grants, there were outreach workers in most new-immigrant
communities, communities of color, rural communities, and urban communities
with large numbers of disenfranchised residents. The program was enormously
successful, and Massachusetts became one of the most successful states
in the nation in enrolling uninsured children. (In the Resources
section of www.tomwolff.com, see Outreach
Works, M. DeChiara, E. Unruh, T. Wolff, and A. Rosen).
The field of community outreach
workers is becoming increasingly recognized, structured, and formalized.
Within the American Public Health Association, there is now an official
study group dedicated to community outreach workers. These workers
provide an enormously effective method for engaging and empowering
a broad spectrum of the community.
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# 4 Community Organizers
Community organizers offer a
fourth way to engage a diverse and broad spectrum of the community
in partnership. Community organization is the process of mobilizing
and bringing together individuals and groups to collectively address
and improve community conditions. Community organizers help groups
(1) identify common problems and/or goals, (2) gather resources, and
(3) develop and implement strategies for reaching the goals that they’ve
collectively set. Community organizers work to mobilize members of
their identified community, so that people can come to the table in
community-wide efforts that involve both broad representation and
effective organization. When that happens, the community as a whole
becomes a mobilized partner.
Too often, a lone community resident
who sits at the table with representatives of the formal sector does
not see themselves as a legitimate representative or carrying any
negotiating power. This is well illustrated in the remarkable consistency
with which community residents introduce themselves at the start of
meetings. As we go around the table, the formal-sector representatives
will say, "I'm John Doe from ABC hospital" or "I'm
Jane Doe with QRS School." All too often, the resident will say,
"I'm just Mary Doe." Whoever taught people
to say "I'm just . . . " as a way of introducing themselves?
And yet I have heard this refrain in communities from coast-to-coast.
Organizing provides a framework so that residents can come to the
table and say,” I’m Mary Doe from the XYZ Neighborhood
Association".
When the Northern Berkshire Community
Coalition in Massachusetts wanted to increase residents’ involvement
in their coalition’s efforts, they hired a community organizer.
This person’s goal was to revive neighborhood associations across
the city of North Adams. Earlier in the century, there had been a
long history of neighbor associations, but they were dying out. The
organizer was able to revitalize these associations. As a result,
neighborhood conditions improved, more residents participated in the
coalition's efforts, and the mayor and the city publicly recognized
the importance of neighborhoods.
In another example from a different
part of Massachusetts, the North Quabbin Adult Education Center saw
its mission as not just teaching literacy but also empowering and
organizing its adult students. The students became community organizers
and the mainstay behind the community-wide effort to provide transportation
among the communities within the region and between that region and
the major cities both to the east and west. The persistence of this
group of adult learners led to a brand-new, federally funded transportation
system that in its first year provided 23,000 rides.
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Summary
As an alternative to complaining
about the lack of community engagement and our inability to involve
those most affected by any given issue, we suggest that there are
effective, simple options: mini-grants, leadership development, outreach
workers, and community organizers. Pick one to experiment with. Try
it—you’ll like it!
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Community Development Can Work Even in the Most Stressful Environments
Even in extreme situations community
engagement can be a critical component of success for social programs.
I recently read a fascinating newspaper column by Rob Schultheis in
The Boston Globe (12/27/04). Schultheis described his observations
of the Army civil-affairs teams and their work in neighborhoods in
Baghdad, Iraq. This is an area that is certainly as high-stress and
conflict-ridden as anything I can imagine. Yet even in this environment
Schultheis discovered the success of a community-development approach.
The Army’s civil affairs teams have done neighborhood-level
aid work, including repairing sewers and building parks and soccer
fields. They’ve helped establish neighborhood councils and women's
groups, and they’ve nurtured these associations until the groups
became important parts of local community life. Schultheis notes that
because of this kind of civil-affairs intervention, these neighborhoods
have remained islands of calm when other parts of Baghdad were going
up in flames. Schultheis concludes that “turning enemies into
friends is a whole lot cheaper than fighting them” (Schultheis’
book, Waging Peace, will be published in June 2005.)
Engaging a broad spectrum of the community,
especially those most directly affected by the issues can bring the
community to the table as an empowered partner. Our success in communities
depends on our capacity first to set this as a goal and then, more
importantly, to learn how to succeed in reaching it.
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RESOURCES:
COMM-ORG
COMM-ORG offers abundant
information about community organizing and community development.
COMM-ORG is an online conference that maintains a listserve for its
participants. This is a lively and very helpful listserve. Its web
site (http://comm-org.utoledo.edu)
includes papers, syllabi, and tools focused on community organizing.
The mission of COMM-ORG is 1) to help connect people who care about
the craft of community organizing; 2) to find and provide information
that organizers, scholars, and scholar-organizers can use to learn,
teach, and do community organizing; and, 3) to involve COMM-ORG members
in meeting those goals. The basic beliefs of COMM-ORG are that community
organizers and academics can both benefit by exchanging information
and resources. COMM-ORG membership is composed of about half academics
and half practitioners. Recently, a client called me and asked if
I had a job description for a community organizer position. When he
called I was not my office, so I suggested that he join the listserve
of COMM-ORG and post his question as a request. Not only did he get
numerous responses, he also was referred to a part of their web site
where he found more than 200 previously posted community-organizing
want ads that he could use as models. This is a terrific resource.
The Right Question Project
(RQP)
The Right Question Project
(RQP) is another very useful resource for building community leaders.
RQP helps people engage in expanding democratic participation by helping
people help themselves. RQP is an easy-to-use educational strategy
that has already had enormous impact on the lives of low- and moderate-income
families. RQP seeks to empower people so that their encounters with
the outposts of government (schools, the health care system, housing
programs, and so forth) become opportunities to act democratically
and have democratic experiences. They call this “microdemocracy.”
RQP products available on the website (www.rightquestion.org)
include:
1. The Question Formulation Technique
2. Parent Involvement in Their Children's Education: Curriculum and
Report Cards.
3. The Tool: Workshops on practicing the question formulation skills
and
applying them
4. Applying the Question Formulation Technique to Health Care: Using
questions to advocate for my child
We have partnered with
RQP in school, community and health care settings, and always gotten
great results.
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