Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But ...what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach.
Dry bones rattling Warren, Mark R
2011., 20100913, 2010, 2001, 2001-01-01, Letnik:
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Dry Bones Rattling offers the first in-depth treatment of how to rebuild the social capital of America's communities while promoting racially inclusive, democratic participation. The Industrial Areas ...Foundation (IAF) network in Texas and the Southwest is gaining national attention as a model for reviving democratic life in the inner city--and beyond. This richly drawn study shows how the IAF network works with religious congregations and other community-based institutions to cultivate the participation and leadership of Americans most left out of our elite-centered politics. Interfaith leaders from poor communities of color collaborate with those from more affluent communities to build organizations with the power to construct affordable housing, create job-training programs, improve schools, expand public services, and increase neighborhood safety.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Setha Low is Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the ...author or editor of numerous books, including Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader ; Housing, Culture, and Design ; Cultural Spaces ; and Place Attachment.
"Provocative and disturbing, this much-needed book holds up an unsparing mirror to an unsettling sign of our times." - The New York Times
Context: Co-creation—collaborative knowledge generation by academics working alongside other stakeholders—reflects a "Mode 2" relationship (knowledge production rather than knowledge translation) ...between universities and society. Co-creation is widely believed to increase research impact. Methods: We undertook a narrative review of different models of co-creation relevant to community-based health services. We contrasted their diverse disciplinary roots and highlighted their common philosophical assumptions, principles of success, and explanations for failures. We applied these to an empirical case study of a community-based research-service partnership led by the Centre of Research Excellence in Quality and Safety in Integrated Primary-Secondary Care at the University of Queensland, Australia. Findings: Co-creation emerged independently in several fields, including business studies ("value co-creation"), design science ("experience-based co-design"), computer science ("technology co-design"), and community development ("participatory research"). These diverse models share some common features, which were also evident in the case study. Key success principles included (1) a systems perspective (assuming emergence, local adaptation, and nonlinearity); (2) the framing of research as a creative enterprise with human experience at its core; and (3) an emphasis on process (the framing of the program, the nature of relationships, and governance and facilitation arrangements, especially the style of leadership and how conflict is managed). In both the literature review and the case study, co-creation "failures" could often be tracked back to abandoning (or never adopting) these principles. All co-creation models made strong claims for significant and sustainable societal impacts as a result of the adaptive and developmental research process; these were illustrated in the case study. Conclusions: Co-creation models have high potential for societal impact but depend critically on key success principles. To capture the nonlinear chains of causation in the co-creation pathway, impact metrics must reflect the dynamic nature and complex interdependencies of health research systems and address processes as well as outcomes.
The Morehouse Model Braithwaite, Ronald L; Akintobi, Tabia Henry; Blumenthal, Daniel S ...
2020, 2020-06-16
eBook
Among the 154 medical schools in the United States, Morehouse School of Medicine stands out for its formidable success in improving its surrounding communities. Over its history, Morehouse has become ...known as an institution committed to community engagement with an interest in closing the health equity gap between people of color and the white majority population. In The Morehouse Model, Ronald L. Braithwaite and his coauthors reveal the lessons learned over the decades since the school's founding—lessons that other medical schools and health systems will be eager to learn in the hope of replicating Morehouse's success.
Describing the philosophical, cultural, and contextual grounding of the Morehouse Model, they give concrete examples of it in action before explaining how to foster the collaboration between community-based organizations and university faculty that is essential to making this model of care and research work. Arguing that establishing ongoing collaborative projects requires genuineness, transparency, and trust from everyone involved, the authors offer a theory of citizen participation as a critical element for facilitating behavioral change. Drawing on case studies, exploratory research, surveys, interventions, and secondary analysis, they extrapolate lessons to advance the field of community-based participatory research alongside community health.
Written by well-respected leaders in the effort to reduce health inequities, The Morehouse Model is rooted in social action and social justice constructs. It will be a touchstone for anyone conducting community-based participatory research, as well as any institution that wants to have a positive effect on its local community.
A new measure of community well-being is developed based on the notion that community residents perceive the quality-of-life (QOL) impact of community services and conditions in various life domains ...(e.g., family, social, leisure, health, financial, cultural, consumer, work, spiritual, and environmental domains). These perceptions influence residents' overall perception of community well-being, their commitment to the community, and their overall life satisfaction. Survey data were collected in the Flint area (Michigan, USA) in four waves (1978, 1990, 2001, and 2006). The data supported the nomological validity of the measure.
Community-based participatory research has a long-term commitment to principles of equity and justice with decades of research showcasing the added value of power-sharing and participatory ...involvement of community members for achieving health, community capacity, policy, and social justice outcomes. Missing, however, has been a clear articulation of how power operates within partnership practices and the impact of these practices on outcomes. The National Institutes of Health–funded Research for Improved Health study (2009-2013), having surveyed 200 partnerships, then conducted seven in-depth case studies to better understand which partnership practices can best build from community histories of organizing to address inequities. The diverse case studies represented multiple ethnic–racial and other marginalized populations, health issues, and urban and rural areas and regions. Cross-cutting analyses of the qualitative results focus on how oppressive and emancipatory forms of power operate within partnerships in response to oppressive conditions or emancipatory histories of advocacy within communities. The analysis of power was conducted within each of the four domains of the community-based participatory research conceptual model, starting from how contexts shape partnering processes to impact short-term intervention and research outputs, and contribute to outcomes. Similarities and differences in how partnerships leveraged and addressed their unique contexts and histories are presented, with both structural and relational practices that intentionally addressed power relations. These results demonstrate how community members draw from their resilience and strengths to combat histories of injustice and oppression, using partnership principles and practices toward multilevel outcomes that honor community knowledge and leadership, and seek shared power, policy, and community transformation changes, thereby advancing health equity.
Building on previous National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshops that explored how safe and healthy communities are a necessary component of health equity and efforts to ...improve population health, the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement wanted to explore how a variety of community-based organizations came together to achieve population health. To do so, the roundtable hosted a workshop in Oakland, California, on December 8, 2016, to explore multisector health partnerships that engage residents, reduce health disparities, and improve health and well-being. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
A look at the benefits and consequences of the rise of community-based organizations in urban development
Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban ...neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? Constructing Community offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston’s poorest areas. Jeremy Levine uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public-private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality.
Levine spent four years following key players in Boston’s community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, Levine found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. Levine provocatively argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. He shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods.
Constructing Community demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.