Contents of Spring 2011 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:

In this issue:

Thriving and Surviving Devastating Funding Cuts: Collaboration and Community Building as the Answer - Part One of Survival Tips

• The present crisis
• Time for new approaches: Collaboration, community building and systems change.
• Four specific strategies
  • Focus on sustaining what you have developed
  • Engage the people in the community and build their support for your efforts
• What is new at TW & Associates
  • Follow Tom Wolff & Associates on Facebook
  • Subscribe to the Tom Wolff & Associates blog

I. The present crisis

The current economic downturn and political environment are leading to a contest between the two major political parties to see who can propose and pass the most extreme cuts to the health and human services vital to our communities. For example, the Republicans suggest cutting $11 billion from early childhood programs and $8.9 billion from low-income housing. On the other side, President Obama, representing the Democratic Party, proposes to slash funding for Community Block Grants and poverty agencies and to eliminate funding for successful health-equity programs (like Boston’s REACH). In all cases the most vulnerable people in our communities will be hurt badly.

The chart is here on my blog . And you can see it here:

This chart shows some of the consequences of restricting budget cuts to the 15% of the federal budget that is called discretionary funding. (That’s a funny term for the services involved. How discretionary are food, shelter, health care, and heating for low-income American families? Or for any of us?) The chart demonstrates how ongoing efforts to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have resulted in an assault on the poor. The military budget, which accounts for 27 cents out of every federal dollar, is also left out of consideration for cuts. (http://nationalpriorities.org).

You may agree that these decisions to penalize the poor while leaving the wealthy untouched are unwise and unfair. If so, I hope you are actively advocating for humane changes with your legislators at the state and federal levels. Even without more budget reductions, our community helping systems have been severely damaged by cuts already implemented and are hardly able to sustain any momentum with the potential of more to come.

So what are those in helping systems doing in response to this difficult situation? I am afraid that my perception is that the major response so far is retrenchment: hunkering down. Nonprofits tend to react by protecting their agencies, their staffs, and their turf. This defensive posture will not necessarily help our residents, our clients, or our communities.

II. It’s time for a new approach: Collaboration, community building, and systems change

We have an opportunity here to consider a major paradigm shift in the way we think of helping our communities—one that will have lasting beneficial effects. Collaboration, community building, and systems change offer alternative and more hopeful responses that will serve us better in the long run. We need to re-think the way we build healthy communities. We need to concentrate on enhancing the strengths of our communities and on relying less on the vast nonprofit helping network, with its focus on our communities’ deficits and on providing services rather than solving problems. To succeed at moving in new directions, we will need excellent strategies. The next section addresses some of  promising strategies.

III.  Four specific strategies, examples, and resources for thriving and surviving during these difficult times

The four strategies I suggest that we implement are based on the six key principles in The Power of Collaborative Solutions (http://www.tomwolff.com/healthy-communities-tools-and-resources.html#pubs). They are:

1. Focus on sustaining what you have developed.
2. Engage the people in the community and build their support for your efforts.
3. Build on what works.
4. Approach your work with an open heart and a focus on interdependence.

Let’s see how these four strategies can help us strengthen our communities at a time when the existing resources are being gutted. I will talk about the first two in this newsletter, and the second pair in the next issue.

1. Focus on sustaining what you have developed

Sustaining what has already been developed and shown to be working is uppermost in people’s minds. However, when we think of “sustainability” in terms of finding replacement dollars for present funding, we are in serious trouble. For many years, I have urged communities to take a four-pronged approach to sustainability. A full description of the process, with all the tools and worksheets, is available for free through the Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice at http://www.gjcpp.org/en/index.php?issue=1

Through this approach we can understand sustainability as going beyond the unending quest for more dollars. Instead, we can think about sustaining our work through:
         Policy change.  Policy change lasts and doesn’t require continued funding to have beneficial effects. As an example, anti-smoking coalitions created bans on smoking in restaurants that continued after the coalitions faded away. We all continue to benefit from the clean air that resulted from their work and the positive impact on people’s health doesn’t cost a penny.
         Letting other organizations in the community take over the maintenance of programs we have established. Once a program has been conceived and implemented, its maintenance does not require as much investment and can often be managed by an existing community organization that has a compatible mission. With careful preparation and negotiation, for example, successful after-school programs created by coalitions or agencies can be adopted by community institutions like the YMCA.
         Community ownership.  When a community’s norms change, that shift may eliminate the need for a program. The community takes ownership for the new accepted behavior. Once smoking cessation activities take hold in a community, the community members may readily act to ban smoking in many settings. Once the norm changes, the community no longer tolerates public smoking.

One particular worksheet from the article at the link above summarizes two major sustainability questions and will be especially helpful to you in planning for the long-term survival of positive changes initiated by your coalition. They are: What do you want to sustain? How will you sustain it?

A four-pronged approach to sustainability can provide a framework for your efforts to not only survive the present economic downturn but also emerge from it thriving.

2. Engage the people in the community and build their support for your efforts.

The second sustainability approach in the list of four requires you to have engaged the community as a whole in your work early on. A recent post on my blog asked the question, “Is the grassroots community at your partnership table?”

Here is a rephrasing of some of what I said there.

How often does anyone in your community go door-to-door in your neighborhoods and ask the residents what they see as the issues and what they see as the strengths of their community? And also ask how the residents think they  can work within the community to solve the issues that they see as most critical to improving life in the neighborhoods?

In my experience, this sort of grassroots inquiry—and community engagement—is happening less and less. Why? How can we function effectively without this sort of information and support?

I am very concerned that we are not talking with the people who are most affected by community problems. If we aren’t talking with them, then we can’t truly understand their issues, find appropriate solutions, get community buy-in to fixing the problems, and, finally, hope for any community sustainability. All these steps are crucial to successful intervention and all REQUIRE having community members at the table with us.

As community organizers and developers, we used to actually be on the streets and in the neighborhoods. What happened?

What do the grassroots bring to the table that can help the community thrive and help you survive? 

1. Residents know what works in their communities. They are the community historians/archivists. They know what has been tried in the past, along with what has worked and what has failed.
2. Because they have this knowledge, they can be the best architects of solutions.
3. Local leadership, which can be strengthened or built through the work that is done in a coalition, is an invaluable long-term asset for the community.
4. Resident engagement promotes ownership of both problems and solutions, and increases participation in making the community better.
5. This ownership can create positive “norms” in the community.
6. Residents can work with both “formal” and informal” leaders and can reach the “yet to be reached” populations.

I saw wonderful examples of alternate approaches to working in communities when I reviewed the finalists for the Community Tool Box’s global Out of the Box Prize. http://ctb.ku.edu/en/out_of_the_box/finalists.aspx.

The paradigm shift that I am suggesting for the United States in our time of economic crisis was beautifully illustrated in these examples, which came from India, the Philippines, Malawi, Kenya, and the United States. I read many of the applications. A number of trends that I perceived in the best submissions struck me:

The projects are asset-based: They demonstrate deep respect for the communities they worked with. They start with the assumption that the residents have the skills to make effective changes.

The projects employ grassroots models: The interventions are delivered by the community residents themselves.

The projects promote clear, cost-effective solutions.

Sustainability is built in: The interventions are designed from the start to be self-sustaining.

The projects take a community-wide perspective: They demonstrate an understanding of the vast scope of the issues, and take into account the ways in which the problems they seek to address exist in a context of the broader social determinants of health.

Click here for the link.

The project that won the $5000 grand prize beautifully illustrated these five principles. The Uhuru Child organization won the prize for its Jikaze Internally Displaced Persons Resettlement Village Project, located in Maai Mahiu, Central Province, Kenya. Uhuru Child is an international community support organization that divides its efforts between America and Africa. In 2008, in response to the violence that followed the Kenyan election of 2007, the organization created a sustainable re-settlement village for 900 internally displaced people.

Initially, that village lacked consistent supplies of food and clean water, access to health care, and sufficient classrooms and funds for education. Half of the villagers were living in tents.

Within a year, the group involved with the project built 56 houses, planted 145 trees, sold 75 low-cost water filters, conducted three months of food relief, dispersed 90 micro-finance loans, and provided 22 educational scholarships to children in the community.

As a result, all of the families have been moved out of tents and into houses, and since the initiative began no community member has died of starvation, sickness, or accident, according to Joe Heritage, Uhuru Child’s Project Manager. Since the water filters came into use, no child has become sick from water-borne diseases.

The Uhuru Child work in Kenya was based on the strengths of the community; it engaged local residents in all aspects of the work; it created clear, cost-effective solutions; it left a sustainable legacy that can be maintained by the community; and it clearly took a very broad view of the issues, addressing everything from housing to building local businesses.

Uhuru Child tells the story of this project in a beautiful and compelling video.link
This wonderful project illustrates how engaging community members and building their support for your efforts can be a key to not only surviving but actually thriving in very difficult times.

In the next newsletter, I will talk about the other two survival strategies:

3. Build on what works.
   
4. Approach your work with an open heart and a focus on interdependence.

What is new at TW & Assoc.

1) Article in APA Monitor: I was very pleased to see that the April 2011 issue of the American Psychological Association Monitor (the newsmagazine that goes to over 100,000 APA members and others) featured  an article entitled “Bringing Communities Together,” which looks at my work in coalition and community building. Often when you talk to reporters you are not too sure what will end up being said. In this case, Kirsten Weir did a great job in taking a long rambling interview and consolidating it into a brief, engaging story. Take a look….
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/04/communities.aspx

2) The Book Reviews are Coming In: When you have a book published, it is so hard to tell what people actually think of it. So it is fun when the reviews finally start to come in. I am pleased to be able to share with you some of the reviews of The Power of Collaborative Solutions that have been appearing in recent issues of professional journals:
Bill Berkowitz in the January 2011 issue of The National Civic Review
"Tom Wolff’s The Power of Collaborative Solutions does in fact give us something different and new, in two major respects: one in its practical teaching, the other in its specific content. Both are distinctive, making this book well worth the attention of any community or civic affairs leader."

Here’s the full review from The National Civic Review. :HERE

Adrienne Paine Andrews in the January 2010 issue of the GlobalJournal of Community Psychology Practice  www.gjcpp.org

"Tom Wolff provides a passionate and convincing case for using collaborative approaches to address our most intractable community problems. He offers personal reflection, case studies and tools based on his extensive experience to help us move toward more effective, sustainable, and collaborative solutions."

Here’s the full review from the Global Journal of Community Psychology. HERE

Brad Olsen in the April 2011 Issue of The Community Psychologist
"The book is filled with tips, theoretical orientations, and practical tools. One regularly encounters sections of the text and says, “Yes, I’ll have to try that in my next dialogue with X organization. That could be useful.”

Here’s the full review from The Community Psychologist: HERE

3) Tom Wolff and Associates is on Facebook! Click here to follow us.

4) Tom Wolff and Associates has a new blog. Click here to subscribe.