Contents of Summer 2006 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:
In this issue:
Employing an Ecological Approach: Building
on Community Strengths
Employing an Ecological Approach: Building on Community Strengths
The core
premise of an ecological approach to community building is very simple. It
states that we need to understand the behavior, the issue, or the problem that
we are looking at in any given community in the context of both individuals and their
environments/settings. These settings may be physical, economic, social,
environmental, or organizational. As simple as this premise is, it is
unfortunately disregarded most of the time. In an American society focused on the individual and
the success or failure of that individual, we too often over emphasize the
individual and underemphasize their settings. As William Ryan (Ryan,1972) showed
us many years ago, we seem most comfortable “blaming the victim.” Certainly
most difficult of all is to address the problem by looking at the interactions
of the individual in their settings. Yet this is what is needed.
Let's look
at an example. One headline issue in American culture today is obesity, especially
obesity in young people. The initial and dominant discussion had to do
with weight loss, dieting, and encouraging physical activity for young people.
This discussion focused on how difficult it is to encourage these behavioral
changes among those who are already overweight. Often this is where the discussion
stopped -totally focused on the individual. Now, however, the issue of
obesity is also focusing on settings. There are ongoing headlines about
taking soda and junk food out of schools, a dominant setting for young people. There
are major projects and funding looking at the built environment (the physical
and structural aspects of a community) and sprawl to see how the design of
our cities encourages or discourages physical activity. Recent research
shows the link between obesity and the physical environment in terms of walkability
(Frank, et al 2006).Other studies also link obesity to social support and collective
efficacy (Cohen, et al 2006). Increasingly, obesity is becoming a topic where
we look at both the individual and the ecological environments. Understanding
obesity in terms of the interaction between individuals and their settings
is the only way we will ever get a handle on the issue.
Many years
ago, while working for a mental health center, I met with a group of elders
to do a needs assessment. When I asked them the broad question, “What
are the major issues affecting your life?” they replied, “Access
to transportation from the rural hill towns, affordable health care, and having
enough dollars to live.” Then I said to them, “I work for mental
health center. Could you tell me what are the issues that most affect your
mental health?” And, they said to me,”Doc weren’t you listening?” And
then repeated that the things most affecting their mental health were transportation,
affordable health care, and not having enough dollars. These ecological
stressors were the major issues in their lives and therefore in their mental
health. Traditional mental health centers would not know what to do about these
issues but would most likely focus only on the psychopathology of the elders
and their needs for mental health services. The elders’ broader ecological
concerns would be ignored, even though they are the major factors in their
mental health, because the ecological concerns would be outside the scope of
a mental health agency’s mandate. Too often the response by an agency
is based on its funding source not the needs of the clients.
I have recently
been involved in a project that focuses on reducing drinking among college
students. Here, many of these interventions focused on the campus and
on the students. A careful look at the campus setting will show that colleges
and universities do a relatively good job of attending to the campus ecology
by controlling alcohol access on campus. If they sell alcohol at a campus facility,
they are very careful about checking IDs and limiting intake. They ban
alcohol from dorms. In most places, this approach then moves student drinking
off-campus. Off-campus is where the students buy alcohol. Off-campus is where
they find other students with apartments, who host large parties. Off-campus
is where the kegs are purchased and consumed. So, this specific project looks
at the campus community partnerships, because in this case the important ecological
settings are off-campus. Questions that are raised include: Do liquor
and package stores check IDs carefully before selling alcohol? Are the
bars similarly cautious? What do landlords and neighbors do when there are
wild alcohol-fueled parties? How do the police and the courts handle
offenders? Are there any real consequences for the students?
One can
quickly see that a campus that focuses most of its substance abuse prevention
activities on the alcohol knowledge and attitudes of students on campus may
be seriously limiting its potential effectiveness by focusing solely on the
person and not the broader ecological settings. But it gets even more complex.
This example of college drinking illustrates that even an ecological approach
can be limited if the settings that one looks at are only on-campus settings
and one ignores the off-campus settings. An ecological approach always requires
looking at the next concentric circle out from the individual to an ever expanding
set of ecologies.
The importance
of an ecological approach goes well beyond health and mental health issues. We
find the same limitation of thinking around poverty, literacy, and school
achievement. Community problem-solving approaches are often limited by
their failure to fully take into account all the ecological factors that
impact the outcomes they are trying to achieve.
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An expanded definition
of health using an ecological approach:
Many years
ago, while working on community development, we discovered the literature
and activities of the healthy community movement, an international movement
started by the World Health Organization. Their goal is to create healthy
communities in the broadest sense. WHO articulates the ecological factors
and premises in the Ottawa Charter. According to the Ottawa Charter the
prerequisites for health are: peace, shelter, sustainable resources, education,
food, income, a stable ecosystem, social justice and equity. This is an
excellent description of ecological factors that are critical not only
to our physical health, but to our over all well-being. The healthy communities
concept allows for a broad ecological approach to issues of health. It
is a useful model for community problem solving with an ecological slant
and an important contribution to the field (Wolff,2003)
The ongoing
national discussion about health and health care focuses on access to care
whether it's the Medicaid Part D access to medications for elders or concern
about those who are uninsured. The focus is getting health care to individuals
in order to improve their health. Although I'm a great supporter and
believer in health access, it is important to remember that the research tells
us that only 10% of our health and of our country’s health is determined
by our access to health care. The remaining 90% is explained by the social
determinants of health, along with biological factors such as genetics. Social
determinants of health, as documented in the World Health Organization book, Solid
Facts (WHO, 1998) include stress, early life factors, social exclusion,
work and unemployment, social support, addiction, food, transportation, and
the social gradient (which is defined as the social and economic circumstances
that strongly affect their health throughout their life). Social determinants
reinforce the Ottawa Charter idea of approaching health issues from an ecological
point of view since these are the variables that are most responsible for our
health status.
Another
contribution to our thinking on social determinants comes from the work of
David Chavis (2006). Chavis notes that “Social and medical research over
the last 150 years has shown that four factors have the most far-reaching and
powerful effect on the psychological, social, and physical well-being of people. These
factors are based on the degree to which people feel/have:
- A sense
of community
- Connections
to other networks for resources and exchange
- Individual
and collective control
- Adequate
economic, financial assets and other resources”
These factors reflected four consistent themes that emerged from the
scientific literature that can be summarized as: community, connections,
control, and cash.
Chavis suggests
that when we approach collaborative solutions around community issues, we always
need to be looking at the ecological factors of community, connections, control,
and cash. This will also be crucial when working with issues such as:
literacy, asthma, access to dental care, poverty, racism, or bilingual education.
By now you
may be saying, so what's the point? This is all so obvious. We know this. Yet,
if you look around and listen to the discussions of almost any group developing
community programs you will hear that they consistently focus on the individual rather
than the settings in which individuals find themselves, and the interactions
with the settings. For example, with asthma, the medical community will focus
endlessly on whether or not the child has been well diagnosed, is on the right
medications, and is taking the medications. Often overlooking the triggers
in the community that actually set off the asthma in the first place. We also
talk about the failure of those on welfare to want to get a job and to work
without first assessing whether or not there are jobs,
ESL programs, and work skills training that will allow them to enter
the employment market. The ecological and economic realities of trying to raise a child
while working at the same time are not considered.
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Settings have both assets and deficits:
A
second major factor that often limits our capacity to productively use
an ecological approach is our exclusive focus on community deficits rather
than community assets. I've had four communities in Massachusetts
proudly tell me that they have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the
state. What a bizarre
thing to brag about! And yet it is that claim that bring them funding
for programs, because our whole helping system is based on deficits not
assets.
The same
remedial mentality that has us focus on pathology, shortcomings, and
deficits of individuals is carried over to our views of their communities. So,
we will describe communities as poor, dirty, hopeless, and full of problems
like drugs, teen pregnancies and school dropouts, ignoring the community's
assets. John McKnight (Kretzmann & McKnight 1993) has made
a great contribution to an expanded ecological approach by articulating
the shortcomings of helping systems that continually focus on deficits,
instead of assets. McKnight
encourages us to look at our communities as sources of strength, and
assets. We need to learn to catalog these assets, help the community
to become aware of them, and make use of them. As we take an ecological
approach to collaborative problem solving, we need to always be asking
about a community’s
strengths as well as its struggles.
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A New Approach to Community Assessments
The classic needs assessment
done in a community asks people,” What
are your problems?” “How can we, the formal helping system,
solve them for you?” This is a formula for disaster. The
first question makes the assumption that this community only has problems
and lacks assets/strengths. The second question makes the assumption
that the only people who can solve the identified problems are the professionals
who are asking the questions. An asset-based ecological approach would
dramatically change the way we conduct every community assessment we
do from now on. We would ask four questions instead of the usual
two:
- What
are the strengths of the community?
- What are the issues that the community
is struggling with?
- How can you (the resident) be part of the solution? How can you help
in the community building process?
- What do you want from us, the formal helping system?
If we went from the usual two questions to the new four questions,
we would begin to approach every community and community problem
that we address from an ecological point of view and from an asset-based
point of view. The effects from this could be revolutionary.
Appreciative
Inquiry (2006) actually goes even further, seeking only positive statements
and moves us totally away from looking at problems as part of a community building
approach. I will explore the relevance of Appreciative Inquiry to our work
in the next Newsletter.
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An Example: The Institute for Community Peace and Ecological Stages
Let
me illustrate how an ecological approach can enhance community collaborative
solutions. For many years, I have been a consultant for the Institute
for Community Peace (formerly the National Funding Collaborative of Violence
Prevention.) ICP is a national organization committed to community
development and empowerment approaches to addressing issues of community
violence. Their mission is to promote the development of a safe, healthy,
and peaceful nation by mobilizing community resources and leadership.
ICP supports strategies that emphasize resident engagement, community
empowerment and expanded national attention to the range of factors that
contribute to and can prevent violence. ICP was created by a number of
funders who were gravely concerned by the growing violence in communities
across America. They began by working in ten communities across the country
to prevent violence.
The
initial focus in most of ICP’s communities was on the violent individuals
and their victims, such as gang members or abusive men in domestic violence
situations. Over time as each community built a violence prevention collaborative,
their work became more focused on ecological settings. This broadened
their view of the issues. Their interventions began to move away
from individuals and towards the community’s settings.
The
experiences in these communities demonstrate how the ecologies that are
focused on by community coalitions can change over time and develop increased
sophistication. In New Orleans, their coalition rejected the emphasis
on violence prevention and instead became the Crescent City Peace Alliance
which prioritized the peaceful outcomes that they were seeking. In
Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Stop the Violence collaborative focused
on the violence in some of their poorest communities by working to improve
housing conditions. In Santa Barbara, the Pro Youth Coalition worked
directly on gang violence, and engaged the gang bangers as part of the
solution, to create positive settings for other youth. In Rockford,
Illinois, the Violence Prevention Collaborative found ways to engage black
churches as allies in violence prevention with black youth. The Rockford
collaborative understood that black churches were critical ecological
settings for disseminating violence prevention messages to the black community.
In Newport, Tennessee, the CONTACT Council always operated from a holistic/community
development perspective and never solely focused on individuals, but always
on the broadest settings. These operations included: saving the Dead Pigeon
River, fighting racial discrimination, creating ways for the black-and-white
community to work together, and supporting economic development. In Newport,
they understood that all these ecological settings were part of creating
a peaceful, nonviolent community.
As
a result of the experiences from these ten communities, the Institute
for Community Peace developed a set of developmental stages (Bowen, et
al 2004) regarding ways that communities engage the issue of community
violence over time. These stages very much reflect the ecological approach
and expand our thinking by adding the dimension of time.
How
do the various ecologies evolve over time in a given effort? In the ICP
model the local environment is tackled first. Creating safety in that
setting is the first goal. As time goes on, the efforts move further out
from the local neighborhood to the broader community and then further
out to larger institutions and to society at large.
The ICP model includes the following stages:
- Creating safety. Here, the focus is on stopping
crime and healing the community. This includes: acknowledging
the pain and loss, attending to community spirit, addressing community
crime, providing crisis intervention, and mobilizing residents toward
immediate threats.
- Understanding violence. Here, the focus is on gaining
clarity about violence issues and mobilizing the community. This includes:
organizing multiple sectors (including those most affected), understanding
the nature, dynamics, and levels of crime and violence, assessing community
resources, and developing community-driven targeted solutions.
- Building community. Here, the focus is on building
human, neighborhood, and system capacity, and creating a safe infrastructure.
This is accomplished by: developing leadership skills, engaging residents
in civic activities, educating the public and raising awareness, addressing
inter-relationships among forms of violence, changing systemic approaches.
- Promoting peace. Here, the focus is on re-framing
violence by attending to factors that alienate and isolate community
members. This includes: shifting community norms, promoting a culture
of nonviolence, addressing the ‘isms’and root causes of
violence, and addressing community image problems.
- Building democracy and social justice. Finally,
the focus is on holding residents, large institutions, and society accountable
for sustaining peace. This is accomplished by: developing effective
and participatory citizenry, advocating for and implementing an agenda
for social change that promotes a just and civil society.
As one can see, these stages start with the neighborhood and expand
to encompass ever larger ecologies, ending with the nation.
Summary:
As this issue of the Collaborative Solutions Newsletter
illustrates an ecological approach to community building, is simple, crucial
and yet often hard to actually implement. An ecological perspective requires
that we look at situations as if flying high above the ground so that
we can take in what is happening to the individual and the ever enlarging
environments that surround that individual from the neighborhood, to the
community, to the region, to the larger institutions, systems and attitudes
in the nation. From this viewpoint we can appreciate both the assets and
deficits of these environments. Finally we can come to understand how
these environments can change and develop over time.
References:
Appreciative Inquiry
www.appreciativeinquirycommons.org
Bowen, L., Gwiasda, V. & Brown, M. Engaging community residents
to prevent violence Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 19,
No 3, March 2004, 356-367.
Chavis, D. Strategic factors for building community: the five C’s
community, connections, control, cash & collective action, Campaign
Consultation Inc, 2006.
Cohen, D., Finch B., Bower, A., & Sastry, N. Collective
efficacy and obesity: the potential influence of social factors on health
, Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 62, Issue 3, Feb 2006,
769-778.
Frank, L., Sallis, J., Conway, T., Chapman, J., Saelens, B & Bachman,
W. Many pathways from land use to health: associations between neighborhood
walkability and active transportation, body mass index, and air quality.
Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 72,
No 1, Winter 2006, p75-87.
Institute for Community Peace www.peacebeyondviolence.org
Kretzmann, J. & McKnight, J. Building Communities From
the Inside Out, ACTA Publications, Chicago, 1993.
Ryan, William , Blaming the Victim, Vintage Books, New York 1972.
Wolff,T. The healthy community movement: a time for transformation,
National Civic Review ,Vol.92, No.2, Summer 2003, 95-111.
World Health Organization Ottawa Charter for Health
Promotion, 1986.
World Health Organization Social Determinants of Health: The
Solid Facts, Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization ,1998.
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Tools: Force Field Analysis
Force Field Analysis
was created by Kurt Lewin to help groups analyze situations and develop
strategies for supporting change. The core assumption is that all
situations are dynamic and therefore motion is always possible; we are
never stuck. Thus we can understand any situation as resulting from
those forces that are supporting and those forces that are opposing change.
In using a force field analysis a group first sets a goal or vision and
places that across the top of the sheet of paper. Then all those
forces that are supporting getting to that goal are listed on the left-hand
side of the paper. Following that the opposing forces are then listed
on the right side. Interestingly, we often more easily identify those
forces that are opposing our efforts than those things are supporting
it. Changes are created by strengthening the supporting forces or reducing
the impact of the resisting/opposing forces. After discussion of the filled
out force field analysis chart, the group then moves to the second worksheet
on Action Options and brainstorms ways to either strengthen the
supporting forces or reduce the resisting forces. The charts below
will allow you to apply this to an ongoing project. Try it out!
Force Field Analysis
Project Goal: |
Supporting/Facilitating Forces |
Opposing/Resisting Forces |
What is working to support your goals?
|
What is working to oppose your goals?
|
ACTION OPTIONS
Project Goal: |
Supporting/Facilitating Forces |
Opposing/Resisting Forces |
Actions to be taken to strengthen the supporting/facilitating
forces
|
Actions to be taken to weaken or reduce the opposing/resisting
forces |
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Resources on community assets:
- Mapping the assets of your community: a key component for building
local capacity. Southern Rural Development Center http:/srdc.msstate.edu/publications/227/227_asset_mapping.pdf
- Search
Institute. The Search Institute provides leadership, knowledge and
resources to promote healthy children youth in communities. The
heart of their work is a framework of 40 developmental assets which
are positive experiences
and personal qualities that young people need to grow up healthy, caring,
and responsible
www.search-institute.org
- Assets Based Community Development Institute (ABCD)
is built on the work of John McKnight and John Kretzmann .ABCD makes
available publications, workbooks, tools, and trainings.
www.Northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html
