Lecture 12 Community Change

Summary

In this lecture, Charlie Collins delves into the intricate world of community and social change, highlighting various techniques of community organizing, approaches to enacting change, and effective elements in implementing these changes. Community change is defined as modifications in policies, norms, power structures, and relationships across multiple levels of analysis. Various methods such as community organizing, coalitions, social action, and technology usage play a pivotal role in driving these changes. Approaches like the community betterment approach, the community empowerment approach, and strategies for implementing long-term, impactful changes are crucial for achieving substantial community transformation. Collins emphasizes the importance of community engagement, developing external resources, and having a coherent theory and intensity in change initiatives to ensure successful outcomes.

Highlights

• Community change is about altering policies, norms, and power structures. 🏗️
• Community organizing includes raising awareness, engaging stakeholders, and forming coalitions. 🔗
• Effective community change requires both external resources and a plausible change theory. 📚
• Empowered organizations adopt both betterment and empowerment approaches for systemic impact. 💪
• Long-term vision and effective intensity are vital elements for successful community initiatives. 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Community change involves altering policies, norms, and power structures, covering multiple analysis levels. 🛠️
• Community organizing techniques are crucial for creating systemic changes, like raising awareness and establishing coalitions. 📢
• Successful community change requires developing external linkages and resources, ensuring local control, and integrating social theories with practical action. 🤝
• Different approaches to community change, such as betterment and empowerment, can either be top-down or bottom-up. 📈
• Long-term perspectives and effective intensity in strategies are essential for community initiatives to create lasting impacts. ⏳

Overview

Charlie Collins explores the mechanics of community and social change by dissecting various community organizing strategies and the elements essential for effective change implementation. Community change involves shifts in policies, norms, and power configurations across different societal levels. This lecture delineates several methods such as coalition building, social action, and the strategic use of technology to achieve these shifts.

Through engaging insights, Collins emphasizes the importance of involving multiple stakeholders, developing robust networks, and wielding a grounded theoretical framework for successful change. The lecture clarifies the distinctions between empowerment and betterment approaches, detailing how each can create substantial community transformations. Tools such as local control, external resources, and integrated social science theories are highlighted as instrumental in this process.

The nuances of community change are further unraveled, focusing on ensuring long-term perspectives and substantial impact. Collins underscores the necessity for effective intensity in changes, enabling them to resonate in daily lives. The lecture concludes by urging participants to question and contemplate the fundamental nature of meaningful system alterations, the organizing techniques available, and the constituents of compelling change initiatives.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction to Community Change In the chapter titled 'Introduction to Community Change', the discussion centers around the concept of community and social change, specifically focusing on community organizing techniques and approaches to community change. The chapter aims to explore various elements that contribute to effective community change interventions and their implementation. A key point highlighted is the need to understand and define what community change entails, primarily seeing it as manipulations in policies.
• 03:00 - 08:00: Types of Community Organizing Chapter discusses the different types of community organizing, focusing on power dynamics within communities. It explores how power is manipulated across various levels, including individual, organizational, and community levels, referencing prior discussions on community power and its impacts.
• 10:30 - 17:30: Community Change Approaches The chapter 'Community Change Approaches' explores the strategies for implementing community changes across multiple levels of analysis. The focus is on community organizing, as a method for creating those changes. Alternative settings are not discussed in this chapter, as they have been covered previously.
• 17:30 - 26:00: Elements of Effective Community Change The chapter titled 'Elements of Effective Community Change' discusses the concept of community organizing with a focus on 'consciousness raising.' This type of organizing is aimed at raising awareness about various social issues to gather a critical mass of support or action. The chapter illustrates common elements of consciousness raising, such as the use of symbolic items like ribbons (e.g., for AIDS awareness), to enhance public awareness and engagement.
• 26:00 - 28:30: Conclusion and Key Questions The chapter discusses the importance of awareness campaigns, using the example of breast cancer awareness initiatives like football players wearing pink gear in October. This serves as a consciousness-raising effort. The concept of community readiness is briefly introduced, though not fully explained in the given text.

Lecture 12 Community Change Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 okay so today we're talking about community and social change specifically for this talk we'll be talking about various community organizing techniques uh we'll be talking about approaches to community change and various elements of effective community change interventions in implementation in order to understand community change we got to understand how we define community change what community change actually is so community change is manipulations in one or more of the following so policies
• 00:30 - 01:00 procedures norms and values power structures relational structures think back to the the power when we're talking about community power think back to the power section of class and it's manipulation around those issues those various issues of power and these manipulations can occur across levels of analysis so at the individual level organizational level community level so on and so forth
• 01:00 - 01:30 right so that's what we're doing when we're trying to to implement and create community changes we're trying to change one of these things across multiple levels of analysis so we're going to start off by talking about how to create some of those changes right how to create changes across those multiple levels of analysis and the way we do that is through community organizing for this talk we're not going to be discussing alternative settings we've discussed that previously
• 01:30 - 02:00 quite extensively so we're going to pass over that in this lecture consciousness racing is the first type of community organizing and this is the type of community organizing that occurs uh when when you're when you're trying to to get a sort of a critical mass around something and consciousness raising is increasing the awareness of various social issues so we all know these these banners these little ribbons right we have aids awareness we have
• 02:00 - 02:30 breast cancer awareness and we can think for those of you who are football fans in october all the football players wore pink shoes and pink gloves and various ribbons and so on and so forth for breast cancer awareness month right so this is a consciousness-raising consciousness-raising event or campaign to raise awareness around breast cancer for example now community readiness community readiness is the extent to
• 02:30 - 03:00 which a community is ready to implement a change now when we think back to uh to to how change occurs into empowerment and power um in order to remember in order to create change in something there has to be an identified issue and there also has to be acknowledgment of an issue the acknowledgment of an issue and the idea that we can do something to change that right do something this was in the prevention chapter do
• 03:00 - 03:30 something to prevent that issue community readiness is the same same sort of idea there has to be an identified issue consciousness raising helps understand that issue a little bit better and then there has to be a way in which we can address that issue and so that's the aspect of community readiness the extent to which a community understands that there's an issue and understands that they're they're ready to address the issue they have the power to be able to address the issue
• 03:30 - 04:00 community coalitions are a different type of community organizing community coalitions include a broad representation of community stakeholders and oftentimes community stakeholders include leaders of organizations leaders of non-profit organizations businesses government organizations these are what are considered stakeholders oftentimes in community
• 04:00 - 04:30 coalitions there's a community steering committee for example where community residents are actually members of the steering committee and take on leadership roles and often in lower functioning coalitions this is not the case and so you really need that that buy-in and that understanding from the community to have an effective coalition community coalitions are also focused on the organizational level so they're they're
• 04:30 - 05:00 they're focused on enhancing service delivery across organizations for example um so in communities that have coalitions with uh domestic violence coalitions for example these coalitions are made up of organizations that address issues of violence against women so they include women's shelters for example they include police department they incur include hospitals and what they try to do is create changes
• 05:00 - 05:30 within the coalition members right so create changes within the within the leadership of the coalition the coalition as a system itself and also create systems changes within the particular locality social or collective action is another form of community organizing and this is social and collective action is is what was conducted or what was um talked
• 05:30 - 06:00 about in the spear article that you read a couple of days ago and what this does is it empowers citizens through constructive conflict so conflict with um with powerful community leaders conflict with the mayor for example or heads of corporations or businesses with the goal of creating policy changes procedure changes around various issues and this is often based on
• 06:00 - 06:30 needs and resources that that are resources that are needed by citizens right so what community organizing does or social action does is it identifies weaknesses and various power structures and creates conflict around those weaknesses in order to create change and this often tends to be grass roots it tends to be very social and this is one place where power is very much exerted and this is a place
• 06:30 - 07:00 where not only power two is exerted but also power over in a lot of cases now community development is another way to create community change community development one of the main goals in community development is to build community resources and again resources is very much broadly defined in this case so it can be job training programs for example it can be
• 07:00 - 07:30 access to education it can be accessed at healthcare so it's building these community resources it can also be in new orleans for example rebuilding housing and actual physical structures after hurricane katrina there was a lot of community development corporations cdcs that were down in new orleans after hurricane katrina to try to rebuild what the city lost during that hurricane sometimes it use uses collective action
• 07:30 - 08:00 i would actually say uh the book says it does use collective action i would argue against that sometimes it does oftentimes it does not oftentimes in community development situations community development this strategy can be more of a top-down strategy right so oftentimes it's powerful community people who work together in order to create changes within the community and so collective action isn't always necessary in these cases because
• 08:00 - 08:30 the power structures are already there people in power are already making the decisions and so they're implementing those decisions from a top-down type of process organizational consultation is another form of sort of community organizing for social change and this is what a lot of community psychologists do and so what they do is they work with organizations to create organizations to create changes in various systems
• 08:30 - 09:00 and so i'll give you an example of some consultation that i did when i worked in michigan there was the the great start initiative was tasked with um having children across michigan ready for kindergarten and ready meaning social emotionally ready educationally ready so understanding at least a little bit of reading and writing um health-wise so they had sort of these
• 09:00 - 09:30 five areas in which children needed to be ready for kindergarten and so what i did is an organizational consultation consultant with other people is work with this system to help them implement uh community organizing actions so they protested at the at the state capitol they brought i think it was 5 000 people to protest on the state capital to make sure that budgets were not cut to early childhood development programs
• 09:30 - 10:00 and they they got a win with that so that was great and so what i and others did is consult with this organization to to help them implement implement those community actions to help them build their capacity as an organization to enable their work to be successful use of technology is also another means for social action and community change and so we've seen this very much recently
• 10:00 - 10:30 through the internet and social media we have our occupy wall street people down here that was completely social social media driven we have our tahrir square here in egypt a couple years ago that was social media driven so technology has been used for a source of organizing and a source of creating community change so now let's move on to various
• 10:30 - 11:00 approaches to community change so there's there's a couple different models here the community betterment approach community empowerment and the community empowerment approach the community betterment approach is often used as i mentioned earlier by um by not with community coalitions but um community develop community economic development corporations or economic development corporations and this is more of a top-down approach
• 11:00 - 11:30 right so you have people who are in power already um trying to enhance the resources of a community to improve community function to improve community well-being and improve the well-being of individuals within a community the community empowerment model on the other hand is more of a bottom-up approach and the goal here is to give community members control of the change efforts themselves so control of decision making within a particular
• 11:30 - 12:00 community and so we've gone over power and we've gone over empowerment and sort of understand what those things are and so the community empowerment model is another approach to community change and both of these can create second order change a lot of people would argue that the computer community empowerment model would be more effective at creating second order change and then we have empowered organizations so this is not necessarily an approach to community change but empowered
• 12:00 - 12:30 organizations um adopt one of these two approaches um or both of them the approaches can be taken simultaneously as well and so empower empowered organizations what they can do is implement actions directly and speer and huey in that article talked about this quite a bit where the pico organization was an empowered organization so they implemented actions directly and they also disseminated information to others so they were able to work with other
• 12:30 - 13:00 organizations and other other pico affiliates other pico organizations to be able to to talk to them about what they did what was beneficial so that's the dissemination of information now there are three sort of elements of effective community change initiative the first element here is addressing multiple areas of action
• 13:00 - 13:30 so when we go back to understanding what community change is right policy changes procedure changes changes in power dynamics and relationships these are the multiple areas of action right so creating actions creating changes around a multitude of these issues not just one singular thing also in addition having some substantial local to control so as we saw with paul spears pico article uh those those pico organizations had a
• 13:30 - 14:00 lot of local control around decisions that were being made in that local community and additionally developing external linkages and resources so developing relationships with organizations outside of your organization or outside of your local community so that you can gain access to various resources to knowledge bases stuff like that in addition
• 14:00 - 14:30 in order for a community change initiative to be effective there needs to be a plausible uh theory of community change and what that means is we it's necessary for us for people who didn't conduct community change work for community psychologists for activists to have a possible theory of community change and what that means is to link social science research and citizen engagement and practical practical experience to action and social change so having basically a plan right an idea
• 14:30 - 15:00 of what we're going to do once we gain power and an idea of what we're going to do um in order to create the change and so uh the the pico article the paul spear article highlighted this very much so where it talked about how the pico organizations would get into relationship with people in power and demand very specific things right very very specific things so this is this is what i mean by a plausible theory of community change
• 15:00 - 15:30 and one particular one potential failure and this this is why occupy wall street has been criticized is that it didn't really have the plausible theory of community change right it didn't have the leadership there to be able to identify what that theory of community change was and what those specific demands were in order to create that community change it also needs effective intensity and what this means is that it needs to create changes in the
• 15:30 - 16:00 community that are strong enough to really make a difference in people's everyday lives so it needs to to affect people on a day-to-day basis and the changes need to be such that they they're implemented in a way that that is effective right and people can see how those changes are occurring and then also finally a long-term perspective so not and this might be also another failure of the occupy movement as well not
• 16:00 - 16:30 having a long-term goal or a long-term plan to see how this would pan out over time so now let's wrap this all up and so let's think about what do changes to communities or systems include what do we mean by community change or systems change what are the various community organizing techniques that can be utilized in order to create systemic changes what are the various approaches to
• 16:30 - 17:00 community change and what are the elements of effective community change initiatives so these are the things that you need to think about when you're thinking about community and social change